The Quarter-Dollar Kings
by RoadOfDorks
Summary: When Tabby spills her secrets, Nazz and Rolf are reunited with forgotten memories and newborn tears fall afresh. But there are important gaps in Tabby's recollections, and Nazz and Rolf can't figure out why. Will the secrets of their pasts present answers for the troubles of today?
1. The Man Who We Called Saint

I met him for the first time in a field a sunflowers, just a few miles outside of the city limits. Back then, that kind of bus fare on my salary was quite an investment, but I was prepared to go the extra mile to make it pay off. The few people I knew who'd met him before told me that pasture was the best place to start looking for him. I found him dozing in the sun, sucking on a piece of candy, right where everyone said he would be. He didn't seem to care how awkwardly I took a seat next to him, or how the pollen would make me sneeze every few minutes or so. I'm not sure he even noticed me at first. For a while, the two of us just sat silently, gazing up at the clouds. It was springtime, and the sunflowers were in full bloom. I'd like to go back to that pasture, sometime soon. The air was clean and sweet and even the dirt smelled like honey.

"I can see why you like it here so much," I remember mumbling to him. He just sort of rolled over, adjusted his knit cap, and smiled at me. He didn't say anything, but he seemed happy to have someone to share his pasture with. There were so many things I wanted to ask him, but I couldn't find the words. I was afraid that if I started gushing right off the bat, I might spook him. Next to me, I could hear him rummaging through his pockets. He tapped me gently on my shoulder and passed me a piece of hard candy. I cupped my hands and graciously accepted the surprise. Everyone told me that he had a bit of a sweet tooth. I rolled the candy around in my mouth for a bit and wondered whether or not he gave sweets to everyone who came to see him. I wanted to think that this gesture somehow made me special. Once he saw me unwrap the candy and pop it into my mouth, he closed his eyes and went back to his daydreams.

Growing up, everyone always told me that I was a stick. It never did me any good to argue with them, because I knew they were always right. It never bothered me much to begin with, so after a while I just started to roll with it. There are worse things people could call you, I figured. Compared to him, though? I was thick. He wasn't wearing his clothes. They were just hanging on him. I could see a bit of muscle hiding in his legs, but not much. He looked like he had a bit of a natural perm going on upstairs, though most of it was stuffed underneath his cap. His hair was black and kind of oily looking, like pitch, or maybe molasses. His tie fluttered in the spring breeze, occasionally catching his nose and coaxing out a sneeze or two. This always started off a chain reaction of sorts that climaxed with the collar of his white button-up smacking him in the face, over and over again until he was trapped in a sneeze loop. He'd then open up his eyes, rub down his rebellious collar with a dab of spit, and then nod off again. I'd never seen one person look so relaxed before. He looked to be a good few years older than I was. If I were to hazard a guess, I'd say he was just a few weeks shy of twenty-four. I let the candy slide towards the back of my throat and mulled over what I was going to say to him next.

"You don't have to be so quiet, you know," he said to me after a while. "If you just came here to hang out, that's fine with me. You and I can just stay here as long as you like, watching the clouds drift on by. I personally find it fascinating." He pulled himself off the ground and spun around so that the two of us were face to face. He crossed his legs and stuck out his hand, grinning from ear to ear. I did my best to return his gesture in kind, but all my nervous brain could focus on was the gap in his front teeth. Eventually, my sweaty hand found his and I started to feel a little less on edge. "Why don't you tell me what's on your heart? It's rare for a person to just wander out here without meaning to." I wrapped my index finger around the laces of my shoes and slowly opened my mouth.

"You're the one everyone back home calls 'Saint', right?" His pupils grew wide and he slowly started inhale. Eyes fixed skyward and his fingers nervously plucking away at the lining of his cap, he breathed out. I started to feel self-conscious. I wondered whether or not it had been a bad idea to have asked him about something like that so directly.

"Yeah," he answered, licking his lips. "I guess I've heard people call me names like that before." He lowered his hands and knit his fingers together thoughtfully. He was still very relaxed, but he seemed a little more focused now. "I figured you might ask me something like that when you made that remark earlier about the pasture. Almost everyone who comes out here to see me nowadays is involved in that world in one way, or another." He cocked his head to the side and started to pick at a few stray whiskers dangling from the edge of his chin. He was sizing me up. "You wouldn't know that name if you weren't," he finished, clapping his hands together as if to complete the thought. "So, why is it you've come to see me today?" With one eye, he watched my lips. The other was locked onto the bottom of my feet. I shifted my shoes a bit so that he could get a good look at the bottom of my soles. Then, I started to talk to him.

I tried to catch hold of my enthusiasm and keep my fanaticism in check, but it was already too late. He'd popped my cork the moment he expressed even a little interest in who I was or why I had come to see him. Back home, Saint was something of an urban legend. Most everyone knew who he was, but no one could claim to be an expert on him. People knew just enough about him to know where to find him and what he liked to do, but no one was quite sure why he lived the way he did. He wasn't really an enigma, and he was too approachable to be considered a celebrity. Saint was just a little part of our city's culture that everyone seemed to love. I was no exception.

To me, Saint was my inspiration. I got into Air Trecks because of all the things I'd seen him do and all the things I'd heard he'd done. I may have met Saint face-to-face for the first time in that pasture, but I'd seen him in action dozens of times before. It had always been from afar, though. Every now and again, he'd fly in from out of nowhere and spend a few hours gliding along our city's skyline late at night. Stormriders flocked to him, like he was some kind of herald or something. He'd talk to them, laugh with them, and offer them favors sometimes. Before too long, people started waiting around, just for a chance to catch a glimpse of him. Once things got really crowded, though, you'd blink and he'd vanish without a trace.

Accounts of his talents varied, depending on the type of person you asked. Got a loose axel on one of your wheels, but can't afford to take it to the shop? Take it to Saint. He'll patch it up for free and probably do a better job than the pros. Can't quite bust that one sick trick you've been slaving over for weeks now? Go to Saint. He'll give you pointers. Got a bad case of vertigo keeping you grounded? Well, at least he won't laugh at you and call you a pussy. The only thing that no one ever claimed he'd done for them was help them deal with rival stormriders. I guess that was why people called him "the saint." He was a non-violent man living in a world infamous for its violent competitions, and I think people admired him because of that. That didn't stop people's imaginations from running wild, though.

Some of the veteran stormriders I knew liked to picture him as an "old boy", leftover from the time when Air Trecks first came to the States several years ago. They said if he were to fight in the East Coast Parts War now, he'd probably be sitting pretty at the top of A-Class. Whether he knew or cared, Saint had street cred. Most everyone agreed he must have fought in the Parts War at some point in his career. "Ain't nobody gets that good just practicin' on his own," the veterans liked to say. "The Parts War we play in now is a different kind of beast than it was a few years ago. Used to be a whole lot mo' dangerous. Now we gots the special anti-stormrider police department to bail out the little 'uns, but they didun't exist back in the day. You watch the way he rides at night. You watch, you learn, and you take notes. He's up there, catching the clouds the likes of us won't be able to dream about for years comin'."

"You just want to talk to me?" he asked, his eyes wide with disbelief. "You rode all the way out here, from the city, just so you could chat with me?" I nodded dumbly and started tracing circles in the dirt with the heel of my foot.

"Cross town, actually," I quietly corrected him. "Full fare. Wasn't cheap."

He laughed. "Well, shouldn't I be flattered? I sort of figured everyone downtown appreciated all the stuff I've done for them lately, but I had no idea I was such a celebrity!" His cheeks grew flushed and he started patting down a few cowlicks that were sticking out from underneath the lip of his cap. "How interesting…I'll have to keep that in mind the next time I blow through." He then asked me if there was anything specific I wanted to talk about. I had a million questions lined up. I started off by asking what made him want to get into Air Trecks himself. He said he'd tell me, but only if I'd answer the same question when he was done. I agreed, though I didn't want to tell him outright that he was the sole reason I got into the sport. That'd just be creepy.

Saint told me he got into Air Trecks because he had some friends who got into it. He said he didn't go into the World of Night willingly, though, at least not at first. "You may not believe this after catching me lounging around out here, but I'm actually a bit of a worrywart," he confessed. "My buddy asked me to look into Air Trecks for him, and so I did. I found the Air Trecks themselves fascinating, mind you. Still do. They're real marvels. I don't think there is anything else like them out there. Now, after all these years, I can't imagine living without them." The admiration is his voice then began to slowly wane. "But when I learned about stormriders and their culture, I got really scared."

From this point forward, he talked with his hands. Every other statement was now punctuated by the rotation of his thin wrists or the waggling of his fingers. It wasn't until then that I noticed he wasn't wearing any Air Trecks. I wasn't wearing any either, though. "All I could see were the gangs, the violence, and all the forthcoming hospitals visits. I told my friends they were better off staying as far away as possible from that world." He turned to me and smiled real big again. "They didn't listen of course, those rapscallions." I asked him what made him change his mind. Circumstances, he replied. Just circumstances. When it was time for him to ask me the same question, I ended up feeding him some lie about chasing after a big brother I don't have. For some reason, this really seemed to grab his attention. I quickly changed the subject. I didn't like lying to his face and I felt like if I went all in with that one, I'd end up tripping over my lies eventually.

He asked me how long I'd been a stormrider. "I'm just a few weeks in, actually," I said, pinching my fingers together." I was a real greenhorn back then. "I just figured out how to ride in a straight line not too long ago." He laughed and told me not to let myself get discouraged. No one starts off flying on their first day, he insisted. I asked him how long it took for him to learn the ropes.

"As I recall, I was wobbly for a long time. A really long time. And I spent way too much time early on trying to catch all my friends, all thanks to my late start." He sat up and pulled in his knees real close to his chest. "But I think all that struggling did me a world of good in the end. This world we've chosen to immerse ourselves in has helped me mature a lot. You see, growing up, I was never an athlete. I was pretty much allergic to any kind of strenuous physical activity. I hated heights, I couldn't stand the smell of asphalt on a hot day, and I'd never ridden in a car that could go faster than 50 miles an hour. I was pretty much a stormrider's antithesis."

He kept on talking for a while, about how he used to douse everything in all kinds sanitizing agents and how he'd obsessively label everything he owned. Saint didn't seem like he was telling me these things because they embarrassed him, though. He explained his old habits away so logically, like he understood perfectly why he believed it all to have been so necessary. Coming from a guy like him dressed like him, I could see how it could all be true. Saint didn't talk like anyone else I knew. He was definitely a thoroughbred suburbanite.

"So Air Trecks've changed you that much?" Saint went quiet for a while.

"Perhaps," he confessed with a smile, passing me another piece of candy. "Or maybe those old habits of mine just manifest themselves in different ways now." He had mentioned earlier he got into the world of Air Trecks at the behest of some of his friends. This piqued my curiosity more than anything, because whenever we saw him riding around back home, he was always all by himself.

"These friends of yours…those 'rapscallions', you called them, are they still around?"

"Why do you ask?" He was trying his best to mask it, but I could tell that he was treating this question with particular caution. I knew because his eyes were sizing up the bottom of my feet again. I crossed my legs instinctively and did my best to put him at ease.

"Well, y'know…back home, we've never seen you riding around with anyone. We always figured a guy as nice as you had friends out there somewhere, but maybe they just weren't stormriders. Most of just think you fly solo, all the time." I adjusted myself and pulled my legs close to my chest, hugging my knees. "We were worried you might be lonely up there, all by yourself."

"My friends are around," he admitted, relaxing his shoulders a bit. "We just don't live especially close to your city. I'm the only one who really likes to hike all the way out here regularly."

"Our city? You talk like you're not from around here."

"Well, that's because I'm not."

Saint insisted he was telling me the truth. This surprised me. For as much time as he spent hovering downtown, we all had him figured for a local. I thought about asking him more about his hometown, but I decided against it. I didn't like the way he started to look at me when I asked him about his friends and I figured if I asked him where he lived, I'd just make him feel uncomfortable again. He asked me what I thought about the Air Treck world and how much I knew about it. At the time, I pretty much only knew what little my friends had been willing to teach me. It was embarrassing to have to admit to someone I admired just how little I knew about the sport, but when I opened up about it, he offered to expand my horizons a bit.

His wealth of knowledge was incredible. He didn't just know Air Treck maintenance, he knew Air Treck engineering. In just a few minutes, he taught me what sounds to listen for when I suspect my parts are failing and how to ride in just the right way so that I can get the maximum number of miles out of my wheels. He told me all about the sport's history and how people all around the world used Air Trecks to compete in all kinds of crazy competitions. Once he started to pick up on just how much of a newbie I was, he got real big into teaching me all about safety precautions and stuff. Before long, I was drowning in a sea of information. I'm not normally the kind of person with enough initiative left over at the end of the day to want to take notes, but that day was different. I felt like everything every bit of info I couldn't commit to memory was wasted. Inevitably, we got around to talking about the East Coast Parts War.

The East Coast Parts War was the only part of stormrider culture that I could claim to know more about than the average shmuck on the street. From what little I understood about the sport's history, the Parts War had been one of our oldest competitions. At this point in the sport's history, it was more like a tradition, like the Superbowl or something. It got its start all the way across the sea, in the tiny island nation of Japan. Thanks to the Internet and social media, it quickly expanded and became a global phenomenon. Stormriders loved it because it gave them a cheap and easy way to assemble rare and expensive parts that they otherwise would never be able to afford. People dug the community aspect of it, too. The way that it evolved into a team-based competition resonated with a lot of folks, and gave like-minded people another excuse to get together and have some fun. Throw in on top of that all the emblems, the territory wars, the crazy mythology, it was no wonder how it became so popular. It demanded that its athletes not just be competitive, but also creative.

Saint casually asked me if I was going to compete in it someday. I told him that I'd like to, once I got to know some more people. What I really wanted to know, though, was how he felt about it. For as popular as the Parts War was, it was largely responsible for perpetuating the stereotype that all stormriders were deadbeat hood-rats just looking for an excuse to beat the shit out of each other. There are a lot of criminal influences still guiding the flow of things today. Saint had already shared with me that the world of Air Trecks intimidated him at first. No doubt a big part of that initial apprehension was the result of all the stories he must've heard about the Parts War. Much to my disappointment, he didn't have much to say about it. He seemed pretty indifferent about the whole thing.

"There's no arguing that it isn't a big part of our culture," he conceded. "The Parts War and its participants have been responsible for shaping the course of the sport's history. Those competitions helped make what we like to do popular, or newsworthy at the very least. Anyone who says otherwise is living in a bubble." He went on to add, however, that there are plenty of distinguished stormriders who have found fame and fortune outside of the Parts War. As it turned out, there were plenty of other more 'legitimate' applications out there for Air Trecks nuts. Hearing about that stuff was cool, but those professional leagues could never hope to hold my attention. I cut decided to the chase to just ask him up front if he had ever fought in the Parts War. I spared him the details about just how much everyone back home liked to speculate about his strength, though. He just laughed at me and pointed to his feet.

"Maybe I did at one point in my life, or maybe I didn't. Either way, I'm just a filthy casual now. So casual in fact, that I forgot to wear mine when I marched out here today." He clicked his heels together and then slipped back into his favorite reclining position. "But if you really do decide to one day jump into that part of our world, I'd advise you do so at your own risk. Don't be scared, just be cautious. And don't do it alone, either. Try and do it with people you care about. You'll probably end up on the wrong end of things more times than you'd like, but friends make for a way better cushion than pride. Or even money."

We talked until the sun started to set. I needed to wake up early the next day for work, so I ended up leaving him there in that pasture before it could get too dark. I've no idea how he planned on making it home, since he didn't board the last evening bus with me back to the city. That made me doubt whether or not he really had forgotten to bring his Air Trecks with him that day. Before I left, though, I had to ask him one more thing. I hadn't asked him for a real favor yet, so I figured there was no harm in trying my luck. I asked if we could make this a weekly thing from now on, and if next time, he'd be willing to go for a ride with me. I was so happy when he said yes. It turned out he hung around in that pasture most weekends anyway, so he was delighted to know he'd have some company for a while. I'd have to take a few extra shifts at work to cover the costs of all that bus fare, but I knew Saint would make it worth my trouble. On the bus ride home, I debated telling all my friends everything Saint had shared with me about himself. In the end, I decided to keep my mouth shut, at least for now. Part of Saint's appeal was his mystique. I could tell everyone everything about him, but that would just spoil all their fun.

* * *

_RoadofDorks, here. Thanks for taking the time to read my work! This piece has been a labor of about five years, on and off, and has been through too many rewrites to count. This is my first exercise in publishing it, however. I love both Ed, Edd, n' Eddy and Air Gear, and both have influenced my writing style and my tastes in animation and storytelling more than any other media I can think of. I hope this piece will help celebrate both of those awesome works._ _I'm satisfied with what I've produced so far, and I'm looking forward to improving as time goes on. If you feel moved, please share with me your feelings, criticisms, questions, and everything in between. Thanks for joining me, and I hope you enjoy the ride.  
_

_This piece kinda assumes readers are already pretty well acquainted with some Air Gear jargon, but I'm sure not everyone is in the know. I plan on expounding on a lot of the details that were briefly covered in this opening piece in future chapters, but I've included a few things below in the form of an FAQ that hopefully will hopefully clear up any murky water that I couldn't clear up on my own. I hope this brief overview helps enhance your reading experience and clarify a few things._

_"What are Air Treks?"_

_Air Treks are like roller skates, except they come equipped with an engine and a cushioning system. This technology allows users to ride around at high speeds and jump ridiculously high without suffering injury, provided they know what they're doing. They come in all shapes and sizes, and some of them are more dangerous than meets the eye. They're a real fun little idea, and I look forward to integrating them into the established EEnE universe._

_"What are stormriders?"_

_Short answer, gangsters. Gangsters who use Air Treks (ATs) to do gangster things. Not all Air Trek users are stormriders, but all stormriders use Air Treks. Stormriders like to form teams, run around in matching uniforms (some of them), compete with each other, and generally just have a good time. Some are good. Some are bad. Some are just chaotic and like to wreck stuff. But they're all entertaining to watch._

_"What is the Parts War?"_

_In the comics, 'Parts War' refers to a worldwide competition where stormriders compete to win parts and infamy. It's very much an underground kinda league, and isn't sanctioned by any legal entity. It's "owned" and operated by the collective stormrider community, so it's pretty much anything goes. There are rules, rankings, and a few unspoken laws, but only a handful of competitors bother to keep up with them all. _

_"Why is the story set in North America? Why the US?"_

_Danny Antonucci has made a few statements regarding the "where" of EEnE, and every time he's asked, the answer is always the same. EEnE takes place wherever you think it does. The suburban backdrop is meant to invite viewers to place the neighborhood close to their own childhood homes. For the purposes of this narrative, however, the story takes place along the east coast of the US._

_"Is there a time-line I need to understand? When does the story takes place contextually?"_

_The weird thing about Air Gear is that while we don't have people rocketing around on magic roller blades in 2015, the setting of the comics isn't exactly futuristic. The environments are pretty much congruent with the New York, Japan, and Europe we see today, which makes integrating the technology into the EEnE universe not so hard. The author never gives us a year, but the likenesses of certain real-life people who appear throughout the story implies Air Gear takes place in the mid 2010s era, which is congruent with the ages I've assigned some of the characters. Without giving anything away, let's just assume that this part of the story takes place many, many years after the end of EEnE. I did my best to imply the passage of time in this opening chapter, and I think if one reads closely, they should be able to pick up on it pretty easily._

_"Will any characters from the Air Gear universe appear in this work?"_

_Most likely not. I love both AG and EEnE, but I'm probably are more attached to the Eds and company than the AG crew. Besides, their stories have already been told. The EEnE crew has never been introduced to elements of the AG universe, as far as I can tell, so I believe there is more of a story to tell if I focus on them instead. There probably won't be many OCs, either. For now, I'd like to focus of the piece to remain on the characters we all grew up with. Events from AG might be referenced (and then thoroughly explained) and some plot devices might exist as homages to the original Air Gear, but I've no plans to integrate anything more than that._

_I think that covers all the jargon that was brought up in the opening chapter. Thanks again for reading, and please let me know if there is something I've overlooked. Enjoy!  
_


	2. Helium Veins

The night before I went back to the pasture, I stayed up late practicing. Even though I knew Saint wouldn't make fun of a newbie, I wanted to prove to him I was capable of applying all the things he had taught me. After riding around for a few blocks, I went home and adjusted my wheels for the first time since I'd bought my Air Trecks. I tried to lube the axels up real good. It was still an awkward exercise for me, but at least now I knew how to try. When I got off the bus stop in front of the pasture in the morning, Saint was there waiting for me. His nose was buried in a textbook. _The Applications and Implications of Wind Sheer in Modern Engineering and Aeronautics, 8__th__ Edition._ I wondered if he was a university student. He looked like he could fit the mold. There was a big bag of candy sitting next to him. Without taking his eyes off of the page he was reading, he reached out his hand and fished around until he found a piece of candy he liked. He rolled it in between his thumb and forefinger a bit before passing if off to me. All of this before I could even get off a cheery, "Hey there, how you doing?"

"I don't know what you had in mind, friend, but if you're interested in taking a relaxing ride with me today, you don't have to look much farther than the pasture. It may look awfully flat, but it's got some pretty nice hills a few miles in." He marked his page, closed the book and carefully lowered it into his backpack. "The ground nice and soft too, so you don't have to worry about hurting yourself should you take a little spill." I'll confess that I wasn't really listening as he was telling me all this. I was too busy thinking about what he was probably going to be pulling out of his backpack next. He still wasn't wearing any Air Trecks when I arrived at the bus stop, so I reasoned he must've stored them away in the bottom of his bag somewhere. People back home loved to speculate about what his must look like up close. The sheer distances we'd seen him clear before told us he wasn't using any old civilian grade stuff. Whatever he was packing, it was top-tier. What he ended up pulling out left me a little bit disappointed.

They were a beautiful pair of ATs, mind you. Well groomed, glossy, and sleek as hell. The laces had a crisp, freshly-scrubbed look to them, and there was not a stray speck of dirt marring the chassis. The leather had a custom white stain to it that made fresh snow look filthy. Everything else, from the wheels to the heels, was wrapped in thick, ivory colored plating that I'd never seen anchored to a pair of ATs before. Saint's gear was radiant, and I guess that suited his angelic aesthetic just fine, but truth be told, I was hoping he'd pull out something real grungy looking, something covered with nicks and cuts and patchwork screws, something that could confirm all the wild things my buds and I liked to speculate about. Eventually, he caught me staring, which prompted me to hastily begin lacing up my own pair. After we stowed away our belongings in a vacant locker inside one of the bus stop's restrooms, I followed him down into the pasture. I was eager to see his technique up close.

For the first few miles, he took it real slow and never strayed more than a few feet off of the ground, probably out of concern for me and my general wobbliness. I didn't fall on my face once, though, and was pleased when he pointed out how just how well he thought I was doing. We had such beautiful weather that morning. The sun was bright, the breeze was light, and the temperature was balmy. The deeper we rode into the pasture, the taller the sunflowers climbed. Before long, the stalks were a few heads taller than we were and the petals looked so thick, I bet we could've used them as springboards if we really wanted to. Occasionally, Saint would spin around and with the click of his heels, he'd disappear into the stalks. He'd run circles around me for a while, always managing to find his way back before I started to get lonely. As I watched him coast up and down the pasture's rolling hills and gently glide across the sunflower's golden crests, I saw firsthand just how different he was from everyone else. Saint made riding look so effortless. Whenever he wanted to accelerate, he just accelerated. Whenever he wanted to slow down, he just slowed down. Whenever he wanted to turn, he'd just turn. And he did all of these things without having to so much as twitch his legs. I was amazed, and also a little bit envious. He turned around just in time to catch me pouting.

"That's a sour face your making," he said smiling. "Don't tell me you're already bored?" I quickly shook my head, almost losing my balance in the process.

"That's not it. That's not it at all, actually," I insisted, steadying myself. "It's just that seeing you ride around up close makes me realize just how terrible I am." Saint rapped his fingers against his chin and slowed to a comfortable cruising speed. He wrapped one hand around my shoulder and grinned. The sound of the wind against the gap in his teeth made a pleasant whistling noise.

"Maybe so, but doesn't it also make you think about all the fun you'll have once you master these things?" Two hands pressed against my back, driving me forward. My wheels struck a few stray pebbles hidden amongst the grass, causing my legs to hiccup a little. I wasn't used to going this fast. Before I could stop him, Saint had us rolling along at a breakneck pace.

"If you stiffen up those legs of yours now," he warned, "you're going to regret it."

"You're telling me that if I trip now, it's gonna hurt?" I felt his hands pat my back heartedly.

"Hurt? Maybe a little, but what's really going to hurt the feeling of all this momentum going to waste. Now, why don't you hold up your head and take a look around you?"

I nervously raised my head. At first, all I could see was color. A never-ending horizon of green and blue, spreading out before my eyes. A heartbeat later, my eyes adjusted, and I able to pick out the clouds in the sky and the sunflowers in the pasture. The pressure of the wind against my face made it hard to breathe at first, but just like my eyes, my lungs soon adjusted.

"Not to worry," Saint said to me warmly, "I'm not going to pluck you up and take you somewhere you aren't ready to go. Just take it easy and enjoy yourself. I'll handle the complicated stuff. You just need to focus on immersing yourself."

"Immersing myself in what?" He gave me another hearty pat on the back.

"Whatever it is you feel right now, friend. Just focus on that." I wasn't quite sure what he meant or what he wanted me to do, but I figured if he was going to help keep me balanced, all I had to do was keep my legs upright and my face forward. Slowly, I began to feel the world around me change, little by little. Like I'd said before, before then, I had never ridden that fast before. By myself, I could hardly keep pace with a bicycle. At that moment, though, with Saint guiding me from behind, I felt like even the motorcycles riding along the interstate behind us couldn't keep up with me. I began to hear sounds that I had never heard before, and smell things I had never smelled before. The line between scent and sound began to slowly blur until I stopped sensing one without the other. The spring breeze no longer just carried with it the smell of sunflowers, but the faint smell of rubber mixed with a hint of cologne. Whenever I heard my axels click beneath my feet, it was always followed by the gentle whisper of grass being pressed beneath our heels. The atmosphere around me became a feast for the eyes. There was too much to digest. By the time I had come to grips with the shapes and colors of one stretch of sky, we had already left it far behind. If I was seeing these sorts of things while I was anchored to the ground, I couldn't help but wonder what kind of world was waiting for me up in the sky.

I felt confidence welling up inside of my chest, so I decided to stretch out my arms a little. I relaxed my legs and let the gap between my feet grow wider and wider. Slowly I let my body lean forward, into the wall of wind pressing against me.

"Do you have a song you like?"

I heard Saint's voice call out from behind me. Though I could still feel his hands pressing against my back, it was difficult to make out his voice. I nodded. He gave me a pat on the head.

"Does it have a nice beat to it? Why don't you try kicking against the ground to the rhythm of your favorite song?"

I called out to him, surprised. "Is that what you like to do?"

"No, not really," he laughed "but I know lots of people who've gone on to do great things with their Air Trecks, and most of them started off doing silly stuff like that. Why don't you give it a try? If you start to fall, I'll keep you grounded." I couldn't see the harm in trying. Truth be told, if Saint had told me I could get better at Air Trecks by eating them, I'd probably have listened. I racked my brain for my favorite pop song and nervously raised my right leg. It felt unusually heavy.

"That's good, that's good! Gather up all those worries, and then dash them into the dirt with one solid kick!" I felt Saint's fingers dig into the back of my shirt. He was getting excited. It was nice to see him so enthusiastic. He made every little step I took towards improvement seem like such a big deal. At first, I was worried he was just goading me along because he knew I was desperate for encouragement, but looking back, I think that his enthusiasm was really sincere. I don't think even the world's best actors could make a smile like his. "Air Trecks are pretty generous machines, y'know," he explained to me. "You don't have to kick hard if you want to go maintain your speed. They like to pay back even the tiniest kick with lots of acceleration, so expect plenty of output for even just a little input." As he spoke to me, I continued to raise my right foot off the ground until my wheels were parallel to my left knee. Inside of my head, I counted the beats of my favorite song against the bumps in the road. When at last I felt ready, I kicked my foot against the ground, trying as hard as I could to shake off my apprehensions all at once, just like he told me. I felt my body spring forward, but the speed boost didn't last for more than an instant. I was still upright, but we were now moving slower than we were before I had kicked off against the dirt. Still, I managed to kick off against the ground while riding at a high speed without totally maiming myself. I felt a little silly, getting so happy over such a tiny victory, but I just couldn't help it.

"A big part about getting better at this is learning how to predict just how much acceleration you'll get from your kicks, and then properly incorporating that acceleration into your ride." Saint kicked against the ground with his own Air Trecks, bringing us back up to our previous speed. His hands stayed fixed firmly against my back. "It's all about momentum. Once you get on a roll, I think you'll find it becomes harder and harder to mess up. If you keep practicing like this on your own, you'll keep making progress."

I must have replayed my favorite song over and over again inside of my head a hundred times that morning. I thought about writing a note to myself so that the next time I went off to practice on my own, I'd remember to bring some my music. I decided against it, though, because after a while, I started to realize that having to actively think of the beat and the lyrics in my head made it easier to focus. Saint's wisdom really was boundless, I thought. I decided right then that the next time I saw everyone again, I was going tell them about this little trick Saint had taught me. Something as simple as this was probably way beneath their level, but there was something about hearing my favorite song play inside of my head as I flew across the horizon that made all my apprehensions about riding disappear. At that moment, as the two of us sped across the pasture, despite still being chained to ground by my own inexperience, I've never felt closer to the sky since.

As time passed and we continued our endless trek across the pasture, I stated to realize just how fleeting all of these new experiences were probably going to be for me. Eventually, Saint would put on the brakes and we'd both slow down, and I'd slip out of this world and back into the old one. If I wanted to come back to this exciting new world filled with all of these strange, invigorating sensations, I'd have to learn how to manage it on my own. More than ever before, I felt motivated. I could feel something bubbling up from deep inside of my legs, but this something wasn't slowing me down. For a moment, it didn't feel like they legs were carrying blood laced with oxygen. Instead, I could've sworn that there was helium coursing through my veins. I wanted to be able fall asleep at night knowing that I could come back to this plane anytime I wanted. I licked my lips and smiled, gently taking Saint's hands in my own and releasing myself from his guidance, even if it was only for a little bit. I couldn't help but feel like a little kid who had just tasted her first piece of candy. From now on, I knew I was going to crave this sensation more than anything else.

After my first ride through the pasture, I'll confess that I became a little obsessed with Air Trecks. I began spending even less time at school than usual, and for the next several months following that first ride, my home life became virtually non-existent. I couldn't afford to skimp on work, though. I needed bus fare to get to the pasture reliably every day, and at my skill level, it was too far to ride out by myself. Whatever money was left over, I wanted to spend on my Air Trecks. Every spare hour I had, I spent either working away, riding around downtown with my friends, or at the pasture. I considered introducing them to the pasture sometime, but I decided against it. A part of me wanted to keep that place a special sanctuary where only Saint and I could ride together. When I started coming to the pasture at different times throughout the week instead of just on the weekend, I half did it because I thought that maybe Saint spent more time hanging around that place than he initially let on. "Maybe he'll surprise me one day," I always whispered to myself as I rode the last bus out of town every night. "Maybe I'll surprise him one day." Much to my disappointment, Saint was a man of his word. The only time I could ever expect to find him lounging in the pasture was during the weekends. Without someone to pal around with, riding alone in that wide, open space felt lonely.

The special trick Saint taught to me, the one where you ride to beat of your favorite song, proved to a surprisingly versatile teaching tool, at least to me. When the first song I picked out for myself became too predictable and boring, I moved onto something fresh. I drifted from genre to genre for a while, never sticking to a single song for more than a week. At the end of seven days, I had simply memorized the song to a point where I couldn't use it to teach myself anything I didn't already know. Riding all by myself might have been lonely, but even loneliness couldn't pull me out of that euphoric haze that I felt wash over me every time I strapped on a pair of Air Trecks. I don't know if Saint understood the gravity of what he had taught me during our first ride together, but to me, what he shared with me was so much more than just a coping mechanism for motion sickness. When I had been too scared to step out onto my own legs, he let me borrow his. When I refused to let my own weight keep my shivering body steady, he had generously supported me with his own two hands. That afternoon, he had shown me that it was possible for me to find fulfillment and fun with Air Trecks. He was the catapult that helped bring me closer not only to the sky, but to the whole world around me. And that was something I was profoundly thankful for.

I loved riding through the pasture at night more than anything else, except for riding through the pasture with Saint on the weekends. On the really clear nights, when the moon was full and the clouds hung low in the sky, I felt like I could ride through that pasture for the rest of my life and never even think about getting sick of it. Weeks passed, spring turned into summer, and very slowly, I was getting better and better at Air Trecks. By the end of June, riding along at top speed had become second nature to me. Turning accurately at high speeds became my next big goal, and with Saint's continued guidance coupled with the constant practicing with my friends, I had that goose cooked by the end of July. After a few more weeks of remedial practicing, I felt ready to ask Saint for my next big favor. Months earlier, I would have probably just held back, concerned that I might be asking too much of him. I felt like I really understood how he thought now, and I knew that he was just as eager to hand out advice as I was to learn. I believed that I was no longer just a rabid fan chasing his tail. We were friends.

"So, you finally feel comfortable with leaving the ground behind and jumping a little, huh? Well, I think that's just great. I think you've been smart to work so much on the fundamentals. You never know, friend; you might just get up there and find that flying in the sky isn't that much different from riding on the ground."

Obviously, my first question was how soon I could start learning, and how quickly I could expect to get airborne. Saint told me that he would be willing to go on another ride with me the following weekend, sometime around noon. I promised I'd buy him something tasty for lunch from a great deli that I knew downtown. From what had observed, the only thing he ever munched on was that hard candy he carried with him everywhere. I wanted to see him enjoy something more substantial. More than anything, though, I wanted to start paying him back for all of the amazing things he had taught me. When I casually joked about being low on funds, though, he got real serious real quick and ended up stealing my idea. Lunch was going to be his treat next weekend, no ifs, ands, or buts. I tried to tell him he didn't need to do that and that I had just been joking earlier (sort of), but he wouldn't hear it. The way his eyes flashed as he was describing all the great take-out joints he knew back in his hometown eventually won over both my stomach and my pride.

* * *

_Two chapters in. I've had fun! A big thank you to those have have Favorited my work. I'll work hard to keep pumping out material. We're sitting at just over one hundred views, which makes me happy. I'm not sure how that stacks up to more popular works, but seeing the number climb a little bit each day is fun. I don't think this chapter introduces anything that would need a more fleshed out explanation down here, so this note'll be pretty short. As always, if you feel moved, please hit me up with some comments or criticisms. Thanks for reading!_


	3. Club Sandwiches & Glass Bottle Cola

I found him in his usual spot that weekend. He wasn't lounging like he normally was, though. He didn't seem uptight or even the least bit nervous, but he appeared to be much more focused than usual. My eyes lit up when he offered me that sandwich. I wanted to dig in immediately, but he insisted that I tuck our lunch away in my bag and bring it with us. He told me that the best place to start teaching me how to fly was a few miles in.

"The ground around here is pretty soft, but I know an even better place, just beyond the woods over there." He raised his finger and directed my gaze far over the horizon. From our spot on the hill, I could see a small pond resting in the middle of the pasture, far off in the distance. The pond appeared to be sitting in the shadow of something else, but the trees were too dense for me to make sense of it. "You rarely have the luxury of having something to break your fall out in the city, but I don't see the harm in using Mother Nature as a teaching tool, just for today." He slipped behind me and double checked the zipper on my handbag. "Just be sure to leave the bag with me before you start jumping anywhere, okay? Can't have our lunch getting soaked, now can we?"

"You mean we're going in the water?" I understood a pond could help break my fall, but I wasn't sure how I felt about my Air Trecks getting soaked.

"Don't you know? They started insulating these things against water _years_ ago. All modern models are waterproof. Some pros can even use their custom ATs to skate on the water, if they're good enough." He waved his arms in a fish-like motion and pursed his lips together, making a bubbling noise. I laughed and asked Saint if he could do anything crazy like that. "Join me for lunch a few more times, and maybe I'll give it a whirl." That sounded fair.

Now that I could skate all on my own, he didn't need to spend the whole time babying me. As a result of that, I think he started to enjoy our time together a lot more. Saint remained in a league all his own, of course, but at least now he could lower himself to my level without having to come to a complete stop. I always wondered what things I might be able to teach him. I wanted to give back to him somehow. Not necessarily by teaching things about Air Trecks, but just stuff in general. He was so much more mature than me though, and it was hard to think of things that he didn't probably already know. As the two of us drew closer and closer to that pond, I realized that the best way to solve this problem was to get to know him a little better. I considered him a friend, and I hope he felt the same way about me, but I only really knew this person as "Saint", the AT wizard. Who Saint was behind closed doors, I had no idea. I bit my lip and let the spring breeze carry away my thoughts. The morning sun rising high above our heads disappeared as soon as we crossed into the woods.

"Hey, Saint, mind if I ask you something?" I tucked in my legs and accelerated slowly until I was close enough to reach out and grab his knit cap. Yes, of course you may, silly, fire away. He always answered questions like that so pleasantly. "Mind if I ask why you love this pasture so much? I mean, it seems like you come out here every chance you get. And it's not like you live around here, right?" He nodded, and reached out with his right foot and kicked hard against the forest floor, catapulting himself inside of the forest's canopy. I watched his body drift slowly in the air for way longer than I thought the laws of physics permit. When gravity finally caught up to him, he had already found his way back to earth.

"Yes, you've got a fine memory. I don't live anywhere near this pasture, so it's not like I used to play here lots as a kid and have some nostalgic attachment to it. But, I'll confess that I'm attached to it for other reasons."

"What kind of reasons?"

Saint went quiet. "If you can keep up with me all the way down to the pond, I just might tell you." I tightened my toes against the soles of my Air Trecks until I could feel the upholstery clinging to my sweaty feet through my socks. I had come to really love the little challenges he was prone to occasionally feeding me.

Keeping up with him that day wasn't hard. The weather might have had something to do with it. I've always felt nice and loose on warm, sunny days like that one. I can't help but wonder, though, if maybe he rode a little slower so that we could talk longer. The way he reacted to my probing was a different than usual. He answered me slowly and thoughtfully, like always, but the way he smiled when he challenged me to follow him made me feel like he really wanted to talk about the pasture.

Club sandwiches are delicious. I've always believed this to be one of the few universal truths that we can regularly observe here on Earth. Nothing about the club sandwich is detestable. It is aesthetically perfect. Lots of color, but it isn't flashy. Plenty of different flavors, but they all wait to assail your taste buds so patiently. And club sandwiches are just big enough to fill you up without making you feel bloated. Just the sight of two long slices of fresh, Italian style bread packed so densely with meat, cheese, and olives is enough to make my mouth gush. And if you happen to give one to me, free of charge? I'll be your best friend until the very end of time. I already had plenty of respect for Saint, but when he told me he had brought us some club sandwiches to munch on that afternoon, I felt ready to follow him to the ends of the earth.

As I unfurled the blanket stowed away inside of his backpack, Saint placed an intricately hand-woven picnic basket next to me and started rummaging through a small cooler. I took my seat next to him and found a glass bottle of cola waiting for me, ice cold. I graciously accepted his offering and gently placed it between my neck and shoulder. The ice clinging to the glass bottle's frosty cap melted away instantly. I couldn't recall the last time I had even seen an old school glass bottle cola in stores. I cracked it open and slowly raised the bottle to my lips. I was going to savor this taste. Meanwhile, Saint busied himself laying out some plates and napkins. Whenever he did anything with his hands, he was always extremely formulaic and precise. He was trying hard to suppress his neat-freak disposition, but he was fighting a losing battle. It was funny to watch him.

"You know, I won't think any less of you if my fork happens to be to the left of my spoon instead of to the right of my spoon." Saint responded by raising a thin finger to his pursed lips and gently shushing me. "Please, Saint, sit down," I insisted between bites of my sandwich and sips of my drink. "You know how awkward it feels to eat in front of someone." He wasn't having any of it. His eyes never left the tablecloth he was so feverishly pruning for wrinkles. He gently shushed me again.

"And do you know how awkward it is to enjoy a nice meal in an environment that isn't aesthetically pleasing? It's awful! Ruins the taste of everything!" I shrugged and went back to attacking my twelve-inch cheese and meat smorgasbord.

Saint fidgeted with the tablecloth for a few more minutes before his hunger finally convinced him to give up the good fight and dig in. His sandwich was just as big and juicy and messy as mine, but the way he ate it made me think he was tucking in to enjoy some caviar at some upscale, hoity-toity kind of place. Two napkins, one tucked under his chin, and the second, folded neatly across from him, just within his reach. He took his knife gently into his hand and after running and few invisible calculations in the air with his fingers, started to cut his sandwich into twelve, inch-long pieces. After arranging them carefully on his plate, he pulled a toothpick from his breast-pocket and began to eat the pieces one at a time. After a while, I started to count, for the sake of my own amusement. Thirty-seconds a piece; fifteen for chewing, two for swallowing, six for a sip of his cola, and seven to dab his lips with his napkin. He was a sight to behold, he was. I asked him where he got the sandwiches and the glass bottle cola. If the restaurant was close by, I definitely wanted to go check it out sometime. Saint put down his bottle of cola and cleared his throat.

"There's a real good ethnic joint back in my hometown that makes all kinds of delicious sandwiches. Every combination of bread and meat you can either remember or make up. They also have a more traditional menu, if you want some authentic Old World cuisine." He popped another morsel of sandwich into his mouth and chewed for a little bit. He emptied what was left of his cola and began to twirl the empty green bottle between his fingers. "As for the cola," he began, stealthily stifling a belch with his other hand, "the restaurant I described to you earlier used to be a little grocery store, way back when. When the family that runs the sandwich shop bought the place, they kept a lot of the shelf-space and stock the place with all kinds of weird little snacks and drinks you'd be strapped to find anywhere else." I told him that one day, when I came into a little more disposable income, I'd take him there one day and treat him, to pay him back for everything. That made him smile.

After we had finished our meal, I helped him load everything back into his bag. Now that my stomach was full and all that high fructose corn syrup was coursing through my veins, I felt equipped to take on the whole world. The pasture's little pond that Saint had described to me earlier that morning made for the perfect backdrop for our meal. I don't think I've had a club sandwich since that tasted quite the same. There was something in the bread that made it especially savory. It might have been tomato.

It was a good thing that he fed me so well, because the rest my afternoon was dedicated to discovering all the different ways I could run, jump, and then fall off a peak and into a small (but sufficiently deep) pool of water. It was a good spot. The cliff overlooking the pond was just tall enough to make climbing it a workout, but also just short enough to avoid making one think "aw geez, man, that thing's really tall". Plus, the water kept me cool, which turned out to be extremely helpful. I say "me" as opposed to "we" or "us" because Saint never got wet. Every few failed attempts or so, he'd roll up to the peak of the cliff and give me a demonstration. This time, the demonstrations were the only assistance he'd give me. If there were any secrets to jumping high and cheating gravity, he wasn't sharing them. The only thing about Saint's secret spot that I didn't like was that it was living in the shadow of a very big, very ugly, very dangerous looking factory. It was such a weird sight, seeing an ugly thing like that hanging out within spitting distance of such a gorgeous pasture. Whenever the wind blew downwind of it, it always carried with it the stink of burning rubber. But no matter how much I tried to ignore it, there it was, just a ways off, tucked behind a few of the pasture's rolling green hills. Even the pasture's army of sunflowers, with their thick green stalks, fat yellow petals, and vast numbers could not blot out the factory completely. Every time I'd climb up to the top of the hill and turn for the cliff, I'd see that factory, lording over us like some kind of troll. I did my best to put it out of my mind and just focus on riding.

"The act of jumping, and then flying, is a very intimate experience for Storm Riders. It's a very personal thing, you know? I'm not giving you any tips or strategies because I don't know any. It's the sort of thing that you have to work out all on your own. I've got my own methods for flying, but you aren't me, so telling you what I do will just do more harm than good."

He'd reiterate this to me every time I climbed back up to the sheer of the cliff. He'd use different words every time, but the message was always the same. To put on a pair of ATs and successfully take flight is to experience the summation of everything that makes Air Treks so amazing. If you've any hope of staying in the air for even a little longer than what would be considered "natural", you're going to have to think long and hard about the technology, and then longer and harder about who you are as an athlete.

When you succeed at doing something, how do you feel? What do you think about? When you struggle, how do you cope? What motivates you to keep trying? How did you overcome previous challenges with Air Treks? What was your method? The answer to achieving sustained flight, according to Saint, was directly related to how I answered these much simpler questions.

There would be no shortcuts. Only practice.

"I've fed you some delicious food and shown you a great place to practice your riding," Saint encouraged. "I've given you all the tools you need to succeed. Just keep trying. If this is something you really want to do, you'll work something out." I took his advice to heart, just like usual, and dedicated myself to working that "something" out, whatever that 'something" might be. I spent a lot of time underwater that afternoon. Way more time swimming than flying. But like I said, the water was nice and cool and the pond wasn't deep, so I don't remember the experience being the least bit painful. Something that I do remember quite clearly, however, was how Saint would always look over his shoulder and stare back at the factory whenever I wasn't looking. The only time I could ever catch him doing it was when I was underwater. From the bottom of the pond, I could see him wrap that thin neck of his around his shoulder and watch the factory. His knit cap always fluttered a bit whenever he moved his head like that. He still hadn't shared with me exactly why he loved the pasture so much. I had assumed it had something to do with the pond and the woods and the sunflowers, but the way his eyes would occasionally drift off towards the factory made me think otherwise. I prayed he was just intimidated by it, in the same way I was. I didn't want to go anywhere near that deathtrap.

For better or worse, that factory ended up having a lot to do with it.

* * *

_Another week, another chapter. Thanks for the views and favorites. I've tried advertising this piece around the web, but since most EEnE fansites have dissolved, there are very few venues left to pitch the piece. If you know people who might enjoy the crossover, please encourage them to check it out. _

_This was a fun chapter to write, mostly because it was the first time I have been able to introduce a locale specific to the EEnE universe. For fans of the show who have been able to pick it out, congrats. I hope to incorporate more elements of the EEnE universe as time goes on. Updates should come regularly every Monday. I've got a few more weeks worth of material written, and I hope to keep ahead of the curve by continuing to add more and more as time goes on. The master document is currently around 50 pages, and I look forward to touching that up and uploading that content when the time comes. _

_Thanks for reading! _


	4. I feel grateful, friend!

"I just can't help…but see a little bit of myself in it, you know? I know it's weird to try and identify with a building, but I just can't help it. It's grown on me, over the years. I love it."

I had always heard a factory was built a few miles outside of town. I remember hearing about the ribbon-cutting ceremony on television way back when I was just a grade-schooler. As I recall, the factory was touted as a real important investment for Lemon Brook. People were expecting it to bring hundreds of new jobs to the area, and if things went well, the corporation funding the project was expected to bring more manufacturing plants into the city. Never did hear much about it after that, though, and judging by its dilapidated condition, the mostly likely reason the factory fell off everyone's radar was the investment fell through. You've probably seen a crack house or two in your time, right? Real rundown old shacks, held together by little more than a few rusty nails and coat of super glue? Pimped out real nice-like with graffiti and kudzu? The kind of projects the projects try and get emergency funding for? Yeah, well, this place might as well been the crack factory that manufactured all the lesser crack houses.

"It looks awfully ominous on the outside, but I prefer it that way," Saint breathed reverently, taking my hand in his and guiding me along the property's barbed-wire fence. I bit my lip. Ominous was a criminally inappropriate word for that place. The factory had a positively lethal look about it. Broken windows, cracked cement, gang tags painted over gang tags, overgrown weeds. Pretty much poverty personified through brick and mortar. The air was thick with dust and smoke and when the wind would blow, it was heavy with the stench of molten plastic. The sour smell reminded me of a time back when I was a kid and stuck a Happy Meal in the microwave without taking the toy out of the bag first. The whole property expanded across the pasture for about a mile wide. The broken glass dusting the top of the barbed-wire fence seemed awfully redundant. Every potential entrance and exit I could spy was bound tight in bright, yellow police tape, and every scrap spelled out the same word. This place was condemned.

I didn't like how standing in the factory's enormous shadow made me feel so small, and I didn't like how the factory contrasted so harshly with the pasture, but Saint seemed pretty content. Ecstatic, almost. His eyes were sparkling. He took my hand in his and pointed high over the fence, towards the back of the factory.

"Can I give you the grand tour? I know it looks pretty dangerous from here, but there's a good reason for that. It's actually pretty cozy inside, once you get used to it." I didn't want to get so much as an inch closer to the place, but I felt like I owed it to Saint to indulge him a little. He had spent the whole afternoon teaching me how to jump and how to soar and how to climb, and he had even brought me lunch. Two submarine sandwiches, with an extra helping of cold cuts, and an ice cold bottle of pop. In a glass bottle, no less. I couldn't remember the last time I had shared a meal that good with someone. I'm a sucker for little things like that. I also was the one who insisted he tell me why he loved the pasture so much, so if our field trip had anything to do with that, I was actually getting exactly what I had asked for.

A part of me wondered if this was where the police would find whatever was left of my body after the evil lurking inside the old factory was finished with me. But then I burped a little and tasted what was left of my lunch. There was no way a man would go so far out of his way to retrieve such an amazing sandwich, just to lure me into a deathtrap. That's another great thing about sandwiches. If they're given with evil intent, the bread tastes like crap. And this was Saint, after all. We were pals. I smiled meekly and allowed me to escort me around to the back of the factory, where the fence had been peeled away a little. If I died in some freak accident, at least I'd go with a full stomach.

Life inside the fence was just as grungy as life outside the fence. As we walked, I watched our Air Treks carve out fat little trails in the soot staining the cement. It was real dark now. We ate a little before noon, so judging by my stomach, it was probably around nine o'clock. There was enough moonlight to see a few yards in front of me, and that was about it. Saint's ATs, with their ambient glow and thick, lacquered polish, made up for whatever moonlight the barbed wire sieved out. No matter how filthy the ground was, they stayed as pure and white and clean as always. The grime just seemed to melt around them. It was kinda strange, but also really cool. Do not weep for the poor grime, however, because it found a perfectly good home for itself with me.

Now that we were up close, I could see that in addition to being enormous, the factory was complex. Winding staircases welded to broken windows weaved around the property as if they were weeds. Dozens of chimneys of every shape, size, and description stained the factory's smoggy skyline, poised to poke a hole in any carefree cloud dumb enough to drift too close. There were many smaller buildings as well, the kind with wide, rusty metal doors and low, thin, tin roofs that look like they would collapse in the heavy rain. Not one round object to be seen. The air smelled ripe with tetanus.

"How can you stand to hang out here, Saint?" I asked, laughing nervously to myself, and taking extra care not to trip on the broken glass baked into the cement. "You can't stand it when your tablecloth is a little wrinkly, but you can while away the hours in this rusty cesspool?"

"Like I told you before, there's a reason this place looks so nasty on the outside. And as long as filth and grime and mess have a good reason for being filthy and grimy, it doesn't bother me." As he was telling me this, Saint instinctively hopped to the side and let a herd of discarded cigarette butts roll on past his pant leg. He wrinkled his nose in disgust. "As much..."

Towards the back of the factory, tucked away in a small garage, was a van. Its paintjob wasn't like anything I had ever seen before. It looked like a time-traveler. Bright purple, all the way around, top to bottom, except for its caboose. Tongues of red and orange flames rose from the bumper. The 1970s had ended a long time ago, but apparently nobody told the van. Or maybe the van just didn't care. Either way, I thought it looked pretty darn cool, the way those flames lit up in the light of the moon. I was afraid of gawking for too long, though. The last thing I wanted was to find myself all alone in the middle of the factory's deathtrap of a courtyard.

The inside of the factory was much more pleasant than the outside, but like Saint had told me, I'd never have guessed looking at its exterior. It wasn't lined with satin drapes or velvety carpeting or anything like that, but it was much cleaner. And it had lots of machinery. Lots of very big, very noisy, very scary looking machinery, though despite appearances, none of it worked, Saint assured me. Moving it out would just take too much effort, so he didn't mind keeping it around. Added to the ambience, he said. What furniture had been moved inside has been organized very carefully. A few couches here, some chairs there. Every now and again, a fridge.

He led me through all of the factory's main rooms. We climbed staircases, crawled alongside scaffolding, wiggled in and out of windows, we did all that fun stuff. The more time we spent moving throughout the factory's guts, the more I started to realize there were three distinct styles of living present. There were a few rooms that were immaculately clean. Everything was organized, labeled, and smelled like lemon scented detergent. These rooms were usually filled with computers, tall file cabinets (all carefully labeled), television sets, and other sundry electronics. Lots of spare headphones and plenty of spare parts. Lots of diagrams too. Mostly of Air Treks. They were all beautiful to look at and very handsomely drawn, but looking at them for too long made my head hurt. The print was tiny and the equations and calculations that lined the diagrams waxed borders were much too complicated for me to understand.

"These must be Saint's digs," I remember thinking to myself. Did the man actually live here, or was this just his home away from home? Every time we came to a new room, I looked around for a bed. No beds, but lots of hammocks. Couches and loveseats too.

Not all the rooms were well organized, though. There were more than a few spaces that were filled to bursting with all kinds of weird, miscellaneous…crap. For example, one room was filled with nothing but old toys. Lots of limited edition type figurines and models. The things were strewn all over the place and covered in greasy fingerprints. Another seemed totally dedicated to housing nothing but crusty old clothes. And then there was the tiny hole in the wall that was packed with bath sponges and moldy old comic books. That whole region of the factory smelled like breakfast for some reason. Like someone had painted the walls with syrup and butter instead of paint. It wasn't an unpleasant smell, but it was awfully weird.

As we made our way deeper and deeper into the bowels of the old factory, the smell of breakfast was soon replaced by another far more 'potent' smell, though to describe what my nose experienced as a 'smell' might be a mistake. Stank, I think, suits the odor a little better. Whoever, or whatever, occupied those dozen or so rooms in the very back of the factory loved his cheap cologne. The whole place reeked of the stuff. I've always been told that any kind of perfume or cologne ought to be used sparingly. Scents are meant to be discovered, not announced, y'know? Nope. Not this one. This stank would knock you out and make off with your wallet if you didn't watch yourself. To his credit, whoever lived here was definitely committed to his style. Unlike the rest of the factory, which seemed to rely on plain old regular light bulbs for illumination, the only source of light down there was the ambient glow of lava lamps. The things were everywhere, hanging off the ceiling, stuffed in little holes, rolling wild and free on the floor. The old van collecting dust in the factory's parking garage would have felt right at home. The few pieces of furniture we passed were pimped out in every flavor of animal print I could think of, and maybe even a few I just didn't know about. A giant disco ball spinning slowly in the very back of the hallway wrapped the atmosphere together rather nicely.

And throughout all of this, Saint talked. He talked, and he talked, and he talked. He talked to me more than he ever had before. The way his hands moved and his eyes flashed made me think this was the first time he'd opened up to someone in a while. I had never seen someone who looked so glad just to have someone to talk to. I started to feel a little better about our friendship. I might not be able to pay him back with important life lessons or fancy gifts, but if just listening to him and talking with him made him happy, I was certainly capable of doing that. But he didn't talk to me much about Air Treks, interestingly enough. Instead, when he finally tired of wandering around the factory, he took me back to what I guess I'd describe as the factory's 'lobby' (the part with the most furniture and a fully stocked fridge) and we started talking about something we had never touched on before. We started to talk about our childhoods.

I told him a few stories about myself, growing up in a little apartment downtown. I didn't come from a family of means, but my folks are loving people. I can't really say I was ever in want of anything, either, or at least in want of anything essential. I was a lucky kid. I had friends. I had fun. Might have been kicked around a few times by a few scumbag bullies, but what kid hasn't? I told him about the work I did, running odd jobs for a consignment shop near my house.

"Do you have any plans once you graduate high school? Got any dreams? Aspirations?" I thought about this for a while.

"Nope," I answered simply, settling nice and deep into the gut of my loveseat. "Not really. I'll probably just keep working for the old lady at the consignment shop until I catch some wanderlust." I made a walking motion with my pointer and index fingers and rolled them across the top of my left hand. "It won't be much longer before she retires. I'll probably hit the road sometime after that, once I've settled all my debts back home."

"Debts, eh?"

I didn't really owe anyone anything. Just a few dollars here and there for birthday presents and stuff like that. I think vagabonding around the country is a pretty romantic idea, though, and I decided a while back that if I'm going to commit to that lifestyle one day, I want to do it after I've made good on all my favors. I can barely do any fancy stuff on Air Treks as I am. I was confident there was no way I'd ever be able to do anything spectacular with a heavy conscience weighing me down.

Saint took his turn and spun me all kinds of wild yarns about what it was like growing up in his neighborhood. He grew up in the suburbs, as it turned out. My earlier hunch was spot on. It sounded like he was a bit of a latchkey kid. The idea of coming home to an empty house everyday would have messed with my head, but I guess if that's all you ever know growing up, you don't grow up resenting it.

"Everyone in the Cul-De-Sac was pretty much left to fend for themselves, especially during this time of year," Saint explained. "The summer months were always the longest, it felt like. We all grew up in some very nice homes, but our parents had to put in work to keep those roofs over our heads." Saint reached over to the refrigerator and popped it open, withdrawing two bottled waters. The moonlight cast a warped caricature of his smiling face against the plastic's glossy finish. The water was nice and cold and made my teeth hurt a little bit. "When you spend that much time all by yourself," he said between sips, "you very quickly learn why it is so important young boys and girls have lots of friends. We kept each other busy. A cynic might just say that we were distracting ourselves, substituting one another for the relationships we couldn't have with our parents." He drained what was left of his bottled water in one swig and then tucked the empty bottle into his backpack and smiled again. "But I like to think that's just what most people just call 'growing up.' "

The stories he shared with me that night were very detailed. He liked to flavor them with lots of elaborate hand gestures and onomatopoeia. When things started heating up, he was prone to getting out of his chair and running around the lobby, acting out every scene until he felt satisfied with the retelling. He told me a little something about everyone. By the time it was all over, I felt like I had grown up with some of those kids myself. They were an interesting collection. So stereotypical in their behaviors and mannerisms that for a while, I tricked myself into thinking he was just making all these people up on the fly. But just before I could commit to the idea these people were just fabrications of some kid's lonely imagination, he'd add a little…'somethin' somethin'. I don't know exactly what you'd call it. Details? Context, perhaps? It's hard to explain in words, but there was always one little 'thing' about each of the characters he described that made me want to believe with all my heart that these people were real. Sometimes it was a quote, sometimes it was a little anecdote about how they dressed, other times he'd drop a little hint at the start of a story that didn't make any sense at all until right at the very end. I wanted to meet these people, shake their hands, and ask them to tell me their side of some of these stories. I'd never been so enthralled by a storyteller in my whole life. He didn't stop talking until the morning sun started to peek through the shattered window panes. I had almost spent an entire day in his company. As hard as it tried though, the morning sun couldn't save the factory's courtyard from its naturally gloomy look. It was just as spooky to look at in the morning as it was to look at when it was dark. I asked him something that had been on my mind for a while.

"Saint…are you homeless or something?"

Most people his age don't hang out in fully furnished factories by choice. He gave me a silly look and insisted he wasn't, and that he just liked to go to the factory to relax and think about things. It seemed pretty obvious to me he wasn't the only one who liked to crash there every once in a while. I wondered if maybe the other rooms belonged to some of the kids he told me about in his stories. As we walked, I waited for that moment in the movies when the secret agent takes the civilian by the ear and tells him not to tell a soul about his secret hideout. I waited and waited for this conversation to happen, but it never did. Don't know if he thought it was implied, or of he just didn't care. I vowed not to tell a soul about the factory, anyway. After everything Saint had done for me, there was no way I was going to tell anyone about the factory. If I let it slip there was all kinds of weird, fun, exciting things hiding behind its spooky exterior, the amount of foot and Air Treck traffic that place got would go from zero to a hundred real quick. He was clearly taking real good care of the property, but there was no way what he was doing was legal. Saint was a squatter. A really cool, really nice, and really talented squatter, but a squatter nonetheless. And I didn't think he deserved that kind of negative attention from either Storm Riders or the police.

He did eventually tell me why he loved the pasture so much. We talked about nothing else as we rode together back towards the bus stop. I got him started on the topic when I asked him what he felt whenever he took flight. I had spent some time last night thinking of a question that would make him think.

"You told me before the act of flying is like…acting out everything you know and feel about Air Treks. You can't achieve real flight unless you have a solid grasp of the technology, the physics, and your own feelings. Am I getting all that right?" He nodded and gave me an exaggerated pat on the back. "So, Saint, what do you feel when you fly?"

I wanted to prove to him I was more than just a fan. I wanted to show him that when I really applied myself, even I could make a genius like him stop and think for a little bit. My best efforts to stump him fell through, unfortunately. He had an answer for me almost immediately.

"I feel grateful, friend," he replied happily, spreading his arms wide. He swiftly kicked against the soft ground and in a flash, took to the sky. From the perspective of a groundling like me, he looked as though he had climbed high enough with that one jump to take a bite out of every cloud drifting lazily across the golden horizon. I watched him cup his hands to his mouth and shout. As he did, a gentle breeze blew from behind us, catching his tie and his hat. They fluttered to and fro slowly, happily, just as his arms did. "I feel nothing except gratitude!"

* * *

_Not much to add here, but as always, thanks for the views, reviews, and favorites! Please look forward to the next installment. After chapter five, expect the story's narrative style to change. I plan on bringing in more recognizable characters after the next chapter is published, and we might just get to see some action soon. I plan on breaking the story into several distinct parts, each with their own distinct style and focus, and chapter five will signal the end of this introductory narrative. Expect to start seeing some familiar faces soon!_


	5. Me and My Factories

I asked him to explain in a little more detail after he touched down. I reminded him that I knew it was pointless for me to try and copy him.

"Everyone feels something a little different when they fly," I said. "Trying to emulate the way another Storm Rider rides will just do you more harm than good." He nodded and assured me I was on the right track.

"So you like this pasture…and that old factory…because they remind you what it feels like when you ride?" Saint smiled and nodded.

"See? You understand more than you give yourself credit, I think." He slowed his pace to match mine. He was definitely talking to me, but he wasn't looking at me, and he didn't reach out to pat me on the back like he usually did. He seemed to have drifted off into a dreamlike state. His hands were wedged deeply inside of his pockets and his eyes were fixed skyward. He spoke to me softly, reverently. But his usual cheer was still there, if you listened closely enough.

"Like I told you when we first met, I was a real…worrisome child. I don't think I've outgrown that part of myself, and I hope I never do. Sometimes, being a little insecure is a healthy thing. And I'm confident had I never found Air Trecks, I would still be just as happy as I am now. But I'd be happy for different reasons. And I feel like those reasons make all the difference." I racked my brain and let myself drift back in time a few months, back to the day I first met him.

"Before I found Air Trecks, I was scared of the world, and for all of the wrong reasons. Finding Air Trecks, learning about them, and developing a real passion for them, all of that helped me overcome a lot of deep seeded issues I had with the world around me. That, in a nutshell, is why I feel grateful every time I put a pair on." He shoved a few fingers underneath his knit cap and brushed a few stray hairs away from his brow. "My experiences with Air Treks helped me mature. They've made my life more interesting, to say the least. More interesting than it would have been otherwise." Saint cleared his throat and plucked himself out of his dream-like state. "I'm still an obsessive compulsive neat-freak with a fetish for law and order, but it is because of Air Trecks that I've learned to celebrate the parts of our world that are big and wide and not always so lawful or orderly."

"Like the sunflower pasture?"

He smiled. "I told you that I can't help but see a bit of myself in that factory. That factory is what I think I really am, deep down." He pointed to his Air Trecks. "That factory is what I am when these magic shoes come off. I feel like I'm something that was designed to operate efficiently, punctually, carefully, never once deviating. But I don't resent that part of myself. I think it's pretty cool to be something like that."

"Those feelings you have make you who you are, Saint," I encouraged him. "You shouldn't resent those feelings. Not ever." He assured me he never would. And the he asked me an interesting question.

"Do you know what that old factory used to make, back in the day?" I thought about this long and hard, doing my best to conjure up a memory of a weird contraption or tool I had seen lying around the property that could clue me in. I got nothing. "It was a gag factory," Saint told me, laughing. "That place used to manufacture all kinds of practical jokes and other gag toys. I know this because when some buddies and I stumbled across it a few years ago, the whole floor was littered with the things." He dipped his hand into his backpack and whipped out a bright red whoopee cushion and held it up to his face and gave it a hearty squeeze. He managed to grab his sock hat just before the escaping air could pry it off his scalp. He then passed it off to me and let me have a turn with it. "I decided to hold onto a few of the gags we found digging the place out, for old time's sake." I played with it for a bit before passing it back to him, smiling.

"So if you identify with that factory so much, what about all these hills, and grass, and sunflowers? Those mean something special to you too? This pasture's a big part of your life, right?" Saint paused and thought.

"I guess they remind me of just how…big the world is. A long time ago, I was content just to keep to myself and my friends. I was like a little man toiling away inside of that big old factory, day after day, perfectly content to live out the rest of my life not doing much else. I was happy, never venturing outside my own little 'factory', so to speak. But as you can see, I was missing out on a lot because I never had the guts to take a few steps outside and see just how beautiful the pastures of the world really are. At least, that is, not until I found myself running around with a pair of Air Treks strapped to my feet."

"Is that why you go out of your way to help people out?" He conceded that might have something to do with it.

"If the little things I do for the Storm Riders around Lemon Brook help them to break out of their shells a little bit and enjoy themselves, and their Air Trecks, in new and unexpected ways, then it is all well worth the trouble."

Things were quiet the rest of the way. I think that after talking so much over the course of the last twenty-four hours, we were both exhausted. I know I was. When we arrived at the bus stop at last, he made sure my pockets were stuffed with hard candy before seeing me off. I thanked him, like I always did, and I asked him if he wanted to meet up again next weekend. He said he'd love that, but before the bus pulled away completely, he pulled me aside and whispered a brief word of thanks into my ear. I hung back for a bit, stunned and surprised and probably red as a tomato.

Why are you thanking me? What have I done for you, aside from keep you company on the weekends? I wish I had taken the time back then to ask him these questions. I could have just stepped off the bus and waited for the next one to come. It wouldn't have taken more than half an hour for another one to drop by. But I didn't. I only smiled at him, told him it was my pleasure, and shuffled along like it was just another Sunday morning. Since then, I've spent a lot of time asking myself why his eyes were so bright and cheerful as the bus was pulling away. I had theorized while we were exploring the factory that he might have been a little lonely, and I think that was exactly it. For as much fun as he was to be around, and for as talented as he was, for reasons I couldn't understand, Saint was lonely. Storm Riders are often compared to birds. We're a pretty social crowd. I hadn't spent too much time riding around with my friends back home, but whenever we found the time, riding with a group was always preferable to going it alone. Saint had mentioned to me once before he has a few especially close friends, and if my memory served me well, even implied that a few of them were Storm Riders. I never met them, though.

The next week, I went back to the bus stop, like I always did. The pasture was still there, the summer sun was still nice and hot, and the sky was still virtually cloudless. The sunflowers were as big and thick and pretty was always, and the dirt still smelled like honey. But there was no Saint to be found. I waited hours for him to show up. After a while, whenever the bus blew through, the bus driver would ask me what my deal was, and if I needed any help. I always insisted everything was cool, and told him that I was just waiting for someone. It was afternoon before I decided to head out into the pasture on my own.

"So the man's a little busy today. A guy like him probably has lots of responsibilities, out there in the real world. He wouldn't just blow you off. Things just come up sometimes. You'll run into him sooner or later. And if not today, maybe tomorrow."

I repeated these sentences over and over again in my head until they no longer meant anything. It is embarrassing to admit, but without him around, I felt like a lost puppy. I looked high and low for him. I checked under every sunflower, behind every tree, and in between every blade of grass. When nothing turned up, I took off towards the woods and followed the creek that runs through them until it spat me out in front of that little pond where we had practiced the weekend before. It was as still and clean and empty, but there was neither hide nor hair to be found of Saint. Naturally, the next place I looked was the old gag factory up the hill.

Getting in took no effort at all. The chain link fence that had standing sentinel over the factory's property line had been blown wide open. Empty lead slugs and discarded bits of shrapnel littered the cement, and when the wind blew low, they lodged themselves inside of the cracks in the tarred cement, like pieces of a puzzle. If the factory had been in a state of disrepair before, it looked like it had just chewed through a natural disaster now. I couldn't walk more than a few feet without tripping over a crater. I followed a trail of fresh tire tracks around the outskirts of the property, past the garage, and out into the pasture. They appeared to head in the direction of the main road. I doubled back and checked the garage I had seen during my first trip to the factory, to confirm my suspicions. The gaudy old van was nowhere to be found. I spent the rest of the day combing through the factory, searching high and low for any signs of life. I found all kinds of treasures along the way. Whatever blew through the factory must have been nursing a serious grudge. I found fragments of stuff I didn't even realize could be fragmented.

Every room was cleaned out. Saint's equipment was nowhere to be found, and judging by all the stripped electrical outlets, they had been cleaned out in a hurry. The diagrams and files were also gone, but there were a few stray papers floating around. I started to suspect foul play as soon as I noticed the van was gone, and blood was something I was keeping an eye out for. Scraps of clothing too, but the only fluid I ever found was the water leaking out of what was left of the lobby's now thoroughly demolished refrigerator. I wandered around the factory for hours, poking my head inside every room I could find, desperate for any kind of clue and closure. I found nothing, and eventually had no other choice but to head back home. Going to the police wasn't something I felt comfortable doing, at least not at first. Cops and Storm Riders don't jive well, and I wasn't confident that they would even be able to help. I was desperate to do something, though, so I tried to make the most of what connections I did have. Storm Riders are pretty computer savvy gangsters, so the first place I took to was the Web. I poked around some forums, asked lots of questions, and did all I could to make the most of whatever leads I could dig up.

I started corresponding with other Storm Riders shortly after he vanished, to try and sniff out some concrete leads, but I didn't immediately suspect that they were involved. I didn't mention Saint to anyone by name, or the factory, or anything that might encourage people to go looking for him. All I was interested in finding out was whether or not there were any local crews capable of demolishing a property that large. I figured the world is a big, scary place, and Storm Riders are just one kind of gangster swimming around in a very big sea. They fancied themselves bad-asses, and lots of them were, but there are plenty of other sharks in the sea I believed to be far more capable of knocking over a factory or two. The sort of collateral damage in and around the factory was the sort of stuff I had only seen in novels, or on the news, or in movies. As far as I was concerned, only something packed with gunpowder and chemical solvents could blow a hole through brick and mortar and metal.

But doing all this research wasn't easy, because Saint and I never exchanged personal information. I never got his name, and he never asked me for mine. All I knew about him was what he told me, assuming what he had told me was the truth. I knew he wasn't from Lemon Brook, but he wasn't exactly from out of town, either. If he could move to and from the old factory the way he did, he must've made his home somewhere close by. I dedicated my weekends to moving around, traveling to different counties and trying to muscle my way towards an answer. It was good riding practice for me, but for as hard as I tried, I never managed to dig up anything solid on my own. It got demoralizing after a while. Time marched on and summer turned to fall. The clouds thickened up, the air thinned out, and as the leaves grew yellow the weather grew colder and colder. I was fortunate enough to still have lots of people to ride around with, but Saint's disappearance had left behind a big hole.

People noticed when he wasn't around. His absence had a real weird effect on people. Nobody ever made much noise about him not being there, but it was obvious to me that when people'd walk around at night in socked feet, busted up ATs snug under their armpits, they were waiting for him to swoop in and offer to fix them up. Everyone was looking for him, in their own ways. Some of the girls started wearing more bandages than they wore make-up, I guess to try and make it look like they had dinged themselves up working on a trick, hoping in vain that maybe he'd see them from way up in the sky and drop by to hold their hands. He had lots of admirers, especially among some of the older women. The veteran riders, who usually talked about him the most and were easily his biggest fans, spent less time reminiscing and more time picking fights with the noobs. But like I said before, no one said anything out loud. Quietly, patiently, somberly, we all started to accept that for reasons we might never fully understand, fate had decided it was time for Saint to slip out of our lives. I never stooped worrying about him, though. I half expected for some of those old pals of his to show up out of nowhere and start asking questions about where he was and why he spent so much time hanging out here. Something like that'd kick off a big search for him, and then we could all come together and really start a search in earnest. But that never happened.

And then, three months after he vanished, I got a package in the mail.

* * *

_This chapter represents a big milestone for me. As I mentioned in a previous note, my aim to to break this story into different parts, and this chapter signals the end of the first major part. Going forward, expect the narrative style to change. More characters from the EEnE universe will be introduced, and I will do my best to make sure things stay interesting. The action is coming! I've probably been running that arc through my head since day one. At the time of this note, we are sitting at around 230 views, which amazes me. I'm glad my work has gotten some attention, and I am looking forward to writing more and more. Chapter six will most likely be uploaded next Monday, as per usual, but I might hold back a bit, just to make sure everything is as it should be. _

_Thanks for your continued interest in my work! Please keep coming back, and if you know anyone who might be interested in this crossover, please spread it around. As always, reviews, questions, criticisms, all that good stuff is welcome!_

_Edit 4/12/15: In order to ensure the next story arc is concise, properly organized, and fun, I've decided to refrain from posting anymore content until it is complete. About half of the arc is already finished, but since the upcoming chapters will deal with the world building that will shape the rest of the story, I want to make sure everything is done properly. The goal is to finish the arc by the end of May, and then after proofing it, upload the first chapter by the first of June. In the mean time, I might upload some extra stuff (like old drafts, old ideas, inspirations, etc.) and then remove those when I am ready to continue the story.  
_

_A big thank-you to all those who have read this piece, favorited it, shared it, and reviewed it. Please continue to enjoy The Quarter-Dollar Kings, and please look forward to the next installment. _

_Best wishes!_


	6. His and Her Inheritance

A young woman sat silently in a dimly lit room. The lights above her head flicker, on and off, off and on, indiscriminately, casting shadows against a cluttered cork-board anchored to the back wall. Her chair is much too small to hold her comfortably, and the way the old wood creaks as she kicks her legs back and forth makes her feel self-conscious. Across from her, hidden behind a large desk, sits a man. His hair is thin and his chin is broad, like a shovel, dirtied by a few scraps of orange peach fuzz. He raises his right hand high and waves it back and forth slowly, doing his best to shake out the forthcoming muscle cramps. He then did the same with his left. On his desk lay a tiny moleskin notebook, its pages still wet with fresh ink. The man's pen, which had just minutes ago been flying through his fingertips at a million miles an hour, lay off to the side, perfectly still, its reservoir of ink utterly drained. An old tape recorder, disguised as a paperweight, hid in the shadow of his wide arms.

The man cleared this throat loudly and slowly began filing away loose documents that lay discarded on the table. Occasionally, he'd pluck a particularly intriguing file from the pack and after fishing around for his moleskin notebook, sieve its damp pages through his fingers, comparing the two. The man's green eyes loved to scrutinize things, over and over again, until he was confident had every kernel of information memorized. As the man went to work, the young woman and her chair watched him closely. He was a muscular guy, but he was built pretty compact. Even though the room's lighting was terrible, she could clearly see some handsomely toned bulk moving beneath the fabric of his black and blue uniform. She wasn't especially fond of police officers. She'd never had a real problem with them, setting aside a few undeserved parking tickets, but there are certain kinds of folks you just don't feel comfortable sharing the same air with. This man intimidated her, for reasons she wasn't sure she understood. Had the two of them not shared a mutual interest, she felt confident that had they never crossed paths, she would have been all the richer for it. In the center of the table lay a small brown package, neatly bound in premium strength packing tape. It was this package, and more specifically the envelope attached to the package, that had brought these two strangers together.

A few minutes later, the officer returned to his own chair. It was just as small and creaky and uncomfortable as the chair his guest was currently struggling with. When he sat down, he purposely moved in a little bit further so that the young woman could get a clearer view of his complexion. He was awfully young for a department head. She wrinkled her noise a little and tried her best to suppress a nervous sneeze.

"You've shared with me a lot, Tabitha," he says, trying his best to relax her. "I'm really thankful for that. You've got a real fine memory. If everyone who came to us were as detailed as you in their testimonies, my department might not need to exist." The young woman continued to shift uncomfortably in her chair, unwilling to make eye contact. He was used to this sort of treatment from prospects, especially people like her. Taking his department's recent history into consideration, her apprehension was certainly justified. But despite those apprehensions, there she sat, her heart in her throat and her butt in his chair. And for that, she had his respect.

"All I'm doing…is what the instructions in the envelope told me to do, sir," she answered. That's all." Both of them glanced at the tiny brown package. The officer reached over and scooped it up in his hands, carefully weighing it. The package remained unopened.

"_Surely_ you've noticed how light it is. I don't suppose you've any idea what it could be?" Tabitha shook her head.

"I'm afraid I don't know, officer. As I'm sure _you've_ noticed, there's no return address." He flipped the package over nimbly and began to scratch his chin with his pen.

"That is interesting…not totally unexpected…but interesting." His words weren't matching up with his expression. He didn't look the least bit surprised. He gently placed the package back at the center of his desk. Hands in his lap, the officer leaned back in his chair and began to crack his knuckles, one by one. "You mentioned to me several times that for as close as you and this man were, you never exchanged any sort of personal information? None at all?"

"Yes, that's right," she replied. The officer raised his eyebrows. This told the girl he expected her to keep talking. "I can't begin to imagine how he even knew my home address. I didn't tell him where exactly I lived in Lemon Brook, only that I grew up in a small apartment downtown."

"Was there a reason he was so secretive?"

Tabitha straightened her back a little and tried to speak with a little more confidence. "With all due respect, officer," she began, "we were both Storm Riders. I'm sure you are familiar with Storm Riders and their sometimes…unorthodox behaviors." Ears now perked, the officer began to gently trip his fingernails over the bright yellow badge pinned to his breast. He smiled gently back at her and didn't interrupt. "While I don't think Saint had a delinquent bone in his body, out of respect for one another's privacy, neither he nor I was interested in learning more about one another than was necessary to have fun." To her surprise, the officer was nodding along his head in agreement with her as she spoke.

"Storm Riders have lots of unspoken rules," he echoed. "Chief among them, 'don't ask questions that don't need to be answered'. Yes, I understand your friends very well, miss. It's my job." Rising to his feet, the officer grabbed the back of his chair in one hand and gently heaved it over the desk. When he sat back down, now just a few feet away from the young woman, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a small piece of hard candy. Instinctively, her mouth began to water. After he popped a piece into his mouth, he rolled it against the roof of his mouth for a bit and with one swift chomp, bit it clean in two. The officer then offered a piece to her. He had been listening to her testimony very thoroughly, and was under the impression she had been nursing quite the sweet tooth. She politely declined. The officer withdrew his hand, disappointed, but still smiling. "I hope that by the time you leave today, I'll have proven to you that unlike some members of this department, I don't hate Storm Riders."

"Is that so?"

"On the contrary, miss, I think the idea that all Storm Riders are criminals is totally false. It's my department's job to protect all civilians from any person who would seek to use Air Trek technology to harm others. Storm Riders are no exception." The young woman continued to watch him quietly. He couldn't tell if she understood what he was sharing with her or not.

"You and I have a lot more in common than I think you realize, miss." He officer picked up the package again and peeled away the small white envelope tapped it its belly. Inside of the envelope was a handwritten note. Though the note had been in pristine condition when she first received it, a few days' worth of wear and tear had rendered the ink smudged and the stationary crumpled. With no return address, the only confirmation she had that the package was from who she believed it to be was the signature scribbled neatly at the letter's bottom, barely larger than a footnote. Never had the young woman seen her friend write anything, so she had no way of knowing who really wrote the letter. But she felt confident the letter was authentic. She always imagined an obsessive guy like him would have beautiful handwriting. The officer slowly traced his middle finger over the last few words of the message.

"Since you received this letter, have you given any thought as to why he wanted you to deliver it this place? A police department, of all things?"

"Obviously, sir," she answered. "But I'm confident my friend had his reasons for asking me to deliver the package to your department." The officer raised a finger to his lips and shook his head.

"If I might correct you, miss, the letter says nothing about delivering it to my department. As far as I can tell, he wanted this package going to just one person." Tabitha blinked. Taken literally, the letter did insist that it is the chief of Peach Creek's Anti-Storm Rider Police Division who receives the package and its contents, not the department itself. The rightful owner of whatever it was that package was carrying, according to her friend, was the orange haired police man sitting in front of her. She didn't like how that revelation made her feel, but if it was what he really wanted, she figured she could get used to the idea.

"Do you have any idea what's inside? If he's asked me to deliver it to you personally, you and he surely have history together?" She raised her head and squinted, doing her best to make the most of the room's poor lighting. The room they were sitting in was more like an abnormally large broom closet than anything else. The officer looked to be about his age. It wasn't a stretch. Maybe a few months older or younger, give or take. It was hard to tell. "There's no way he would do something as arbitrary as sending it off to a total stranger. Surely you've some idea what he was thinking?"

"No, I don't," the officer answered her flatly. He totally ignored her second question. His guest picked up on this quickly, and changed her inquiry a little bit. She had her own goals to meet before the conversation's end.

"I have my own ideas why he might have wanted a police officer to inherit that package, but he didn't send it directly to you for a reason. He chose to use me as a courier." The officer withdrew another piece of candy from his bag. He didn't eat this piece immediately, but instead played with it a little bit, rolling it around the spaces between his fingers. "Something that I would like to know, officer, is why you think he's insisted on getting the package to you in such a roundabout way?"

"That's something I'd love to know myself."

"Why do you think he wants you to have it?"

"That's also something I'd love to know."

The two remained in a deadlock for a while. Tabitha continued to eye the officer intently, and the officer stared back at her politely. She could tell there were things he wasn't telling her, but what she couldn't tell was whether or not he was keeping secrets because he was legally obligated to as an officer of the law, or if he was playing dumb for his own personal reasons. She thought a little bit about what he had shared with her earlier.

"All Storm Riders aren't criminals," she paraphrased inside her head. "I want to protect all civilians from those who would abuse Air Treks." The more she thought about his words and the circumstances that had brought them together, the more confident she was that the officer was, without a doubt, keeping some of his cards hidden. There were also other variables to consider. Though she was confident it was Saint who had sent her the package, she didn't know what prompted him to send it to her so long after his disappearance. Why three months? Why wait until the middle of October? Perhaps he had been injured or something the day the old factory went down and needed to keep a low profile. There was no way what happened at the factory was an accident. She decided to probe the officer a little. Much to her surprise, he actually opened up a little.

"The date that old factory went up, according to your testimony, at least, is consistent with a report we got about a week later from our sister department over in Lemon Brook. Some prospectors combing the area for land to develop said they smelled a really foul wind blowing in from its direction and when they went to check things out, they saw just how trashed the place was, and assumed something foul had gone down. But they didn't file that report with my department." The young woman's ears perked up in surprise.

"They didn't?"

The officer nodded. "They took it up with someone else. I only heard about it because that factory is pretty close to where this department's jurisdiction stops and Lemon Brook's jurisdiction starts. Sometimes we exchange reports if they involve areas close to that border." The officer then laughed a little bit, more at himself than at his guest.

"See, I'm what you might call a small fish swimming in a little pond. Peach Creek PD is made up of all kinds of different sub-departments, and Air Trek Control is just one of them. Probably our smallest. More often than not, I gotta go out and hunt crap like this down, because civilians file the wrong reports with the wrong people."

"So what do you think happened at the factory?" The officer took his time with this one. The stick of hard candy hanging from his lower lip reminded her of the cigars all the cops in all those old hard-boiled detective films liked to chew on during an especially intense interrogation. Several minutes had passed since he had played with it, and its sticky sweet finish was now glued to his lips. When he finally did speak, he had to pry the candy off his mouth with his tongue.

"I have some ideas," he began, sliding the candy down his throat and swallowing. "I'm not at liberty to share too much with you, but what I can tell you is the factory made for a pretty good hangout, or whatever it was the man was using it for. I know this for certain because every few months or so, depending on which department is on the cycle, someone from either our department or Lemon Brooks' drives up to the property and does a quick little survey, mostly to flush out any squatters or bums who might've taken up residence inside. Until I heard your testimony today, we all figured that place was totally empty." Tabitha began to tap her foot against the floor. Her eyebrows furrowed. There was no way that could be true, given just how much furniture and appliances and crap she had seen inside, but the officer insisted he was telling the truth.

"The most we ever found inside that place were a bunch of moldy old whoopee cushions and other weird little gag toys. Whatever you saw inside that place must've been moved in recently, because when we checked it out a few months back, there were no signs that anyone had lived there in a very long time."

The officer was assailed with a few more questions before his very curious guest was totally tapped. Are you sure you can't tell me why the person who mailed this package wanted you to receive it? Are you positive you don't have the slightest idea what went on at the factory three months ago? Surely you could tell me if you knew who Saint was before he went AWOL? She tried to be as conniving as possible, asking the same questions again and again but in different ways. The red haired officer was having none of it. He was used to having his brain picked by people a lot bigger and a lot meaner and a lot more direct than her, and there was no way he was going to share with this woman anything he wasn't sure of himself.

Their meeting was largely over. He had received the package and explained to the woman his department's procedures. An e-mail address and phone number that could be used to contact him in an emergency was tucked inside of her pocket, and he had even gone as far as to tell her where she could find him after his shift was over, should she ever need to find him. Though the woman was too young and a little too flustered to recognize it, the officer had proven to her multiple times throughout their conversation that he was very much on her side, and just as invested in unraveling the mystery behind her friend's mysterious disappearance as she was herself.

Nearly an hour had passed since she had arrived outside his door, shaken and concerned, tiny brown package cradled tightly in her arms. It was almost noon. It would be time to eat lunch soon. The officer slowly rose from his seat and wheeled his chair back behind his desk. As soon as his back was turned to his guest, she stood up and finally asked him the question he had been waiting to hear from the very start. She ended up shouting the question, but the way her arms shook after she was done talking and the way her knees bent made him think that maybe she didn't mean to be so loud and abrasive. He didn't mind, though. The important thing was that she had asked him the right question, and that he was ready and willing to answer her, not as an officer of the law, but as someone with whom she shared the same goals.

"If you can't tell me anything about him, or that package, or the old factory, then please, let me at least ask you this…"

Back arched and hands stuck fast to her wide hips, Tabitha reeled her head backwards and belted out what really had been eating away at her since she first read the note attached to the little brown package.

"How can I help him?"

The officer's answer was simple, and it didn't involve a lot of talking. He reached across his desk and slid his fingers underneath one of the drawers, pulling it all the way out, until the metals bars holding the wood together clicked into place. Buried in the very back of the desk, crammed against the way and wedged between a wad of old lottery tickets and gas receipts, was a stack of bright red coupons. The officer withdrew a single coupon from the stack and sieved it between his fingers, like it was a hundred dollar bill, fresh off the presses. He then called the young woman over to his side with his finger and slipped the coupon into her pocket. She immediately took the coupon back out and closely examined it. _Nana Vorlick's Old World Sandwich House. _The officer looked down at his wrist watch and smiled.

"There's a little delicatessen about three blocks away from this police station. Owned and operated by an old buddy of mine and his family. Everyone who cooks under that roof makes the kind of food that makes men kill and women cheat on their diets. Head on over there in a few minutes, right around noon, and ask for the little blonde hostess who usually busses tables in the back. She'll take good care of ya."

Tabitha studied the coupon carefully and then looked up at the officer, clearly excited at the prospect of a free lunch, but also very curious. And awfully suspicious.

"I don't mean to sound ungrateful, but how in the world is eating at an old world sandwich house going to help out anyone?"

"Just tell the little blonde waitress everything you told me," the officer replied, "and we'll just see where we go."


	7. Contact at the Sandwich House

Finding the sandwich shop wasn't hard. The city air was ripe with the smell of gasoline and the usual sights and sounds of the noon lunch rush, but it didn't take long for Tabitha's nose to pick out the aroma of freshly baked bread wafting from a few blocks up the road. Tabitha had never spent more than a few hours in Peach Creek, and because most of her family and friends lived within just a few miles of Lemon Brook, rarely did she have an excuse to pay her neighboring metropolis a visit. A long time ago, she thought to herself, following her nose up and down the winding city block, she might have spent a night or two in town. She had trouble remembering exactly why. It might have been for a distant relative's funeral or something. But she couldn't say for sure. _Nana Vorlick's Old World Sandwich House_ was a typical hole-in-the-wall kind of place. Compact on the outside, but surprisingly large on the inside. Most Mom n' Pop style restaurants keep a little bell or something anchored to the front door so employees know when a hungry customer is closing in. Not _Nana Vorlick's_. Instead, incoming guests were treated to the gentle crank of a sheep whistle. The sound of bleating sheep made her even hungrier. Lamb was pretty darn tasty, especially when seasoned and sandwiched between two thick slices of spiced bread.

She quietly took a seat near the counter and waited for someone from the wait-staff to usher her inside. The sandwich house definitely had an "ethnic" vibe about it. _Nana Vorlick's_ didn't play. "Old world sandwich shop" wasn't just in a title. The whole "sheep" theme stretched as far and wide as the store itself. There were no quaint little pictures of sailing ships or local sports teams hanging on the walls. Instead, shepherd crooks of all shapes, sizes, and colors fought for shelf-space above funny-looking tables and chairs. The few pictures she could pick out looked quite old and had been framed with great care. The men and women depicted in the portraits all looked alike, and were probably ripped out of the same old scrapbook. Likely the family that owns the place, Tabitha thought. Most of the tables were too large to hold just one or two people. Everything looked to be set up family-style. Eating with strangers wasn't something the she was accustomed to, so she privately wished that the lunch rush wouldn't be too bad.

From the very back of the restaurant, she could hear the cooks and the wait-staff shouting at one another in a language she didn't understand. When she raised her head a little bit to try and listen more closely, she saw that the old-school blackboard-and-chalk style menu hanging above the countertop was written in two different languages. Though she could just barely make out the poorly shaped English letters, what really caught her eyes were the beautiful letters that occupied the other side of the chalkboard. Whatever alphabet the letters called home she wasn't sure, but the author's calligraphy was beautiful. Patiently she waited by the counter, watching customers and staff hustle about the shop. Soon, she found herself in the company of a very eclectic group of people. It seemed _Nana Vorlick's_ was popular with everyone. Behind her stood some business-tycoon looking folks and a merry crew of construction workers. At the very back of the line, stretching all the way out the door, a line of school children was beginning to form. Their poor teacher had her hands full, bussing her students in and out and around everyone else queueing up for a bite to eat. A neat little place like this probably made for a cool field trip.

_Nana Vorlick's_ looked to be split into two distinct parts. Off to the left were the tables, the bar, and a dozen or so rocking chairs. The dining area was well furnished and cozy looking, dignified without being too stuffy. The right side of the restaurant, which stretched into the deepest, darkest part of the deli, was cramped with shelves and wooden crates and miniature shopping carts. The smell of pickled vegetables and cured meats assailed the young woman's nostrils whenever a member of the wait-staff hastily shuffled past one of the shelves on his way towards the dining room. She checked her watch and nervously rubbed her coupon against her fingers. It was almost a quarter after twelve o'clock noon, and there was no sign of the little blonde waitress the police officer had so fondly described. On the contrary, everyone she saw in uniform looked to be fresh off the boat from some foreign country her poor western tongue couldn't begin to pronounce. To pass the time, she studied the menu. A particularly tasty description of a classic Italian sub grabbed her attention.

Before she could pick out her preferred side-dish, the sound of a sheep bleating broke her concentration. Behind her, she could feel the line shifting. The young woman tucked her coupon back inside of her pocket and stepped to the side instinctively when she heard the sound of heels fast approaching. The small door in front of her separating the customers from the register swung to the side and when Tabitha looked up, a little blonde twenty-something waitress was smiling sweetly back at her.

"I'm so sorry we've kept you waiting. You know how evil traffic is this time of day, especially around here." The blonde reached into her uniform's breast pocket and withdrew a small notepad. She raised her fingers high and gave her pen a quick click, showing off her glossy, burgundy nails. "So, what would you like _Nana Vorlick's_ to fix you today?"

The young woman stared the blonde down silently, doing her best to match her body type with the description the officer had given her at the station. This chick could definitely be her. She was tiny, just like he said, and wore her blonde hair short. Her nails were bright and her waist was thin. Though she didn't seem too happy to have to work in an old world style apron and dress combo, she had made the most of the few options she had as an employee and customized her ensemble with a few brightly colored pins and bangles. Underneath her long white sleeves, the outline of what appeared to be a small tattoo could be seen. Nervously, the young woman handed the waitress her coupon.

"I'd like the Italian sub, please," she mumbled. "With a side of fries and a small cola." The waitress gave her a plastic smile and accepted the coupon. When she took a closer look at the coupon to verify its expiration date, the young woman saw the blonde's composure slip. She let the red coupon roll right off her fingers and slowly drift towards the floor. The blonde snapped back to reality just before the coupon touched the floor, and quickly snatched it up. Instead of depositing the coupon into the register, she folded it in two and slipped it into her apron's pouch.

"And where would you like to sit today?" The way the waitress' eyes were now shining expectantly at her made the young woman feel like something of a celebrity. It wasn't a sensation she was used to, and wasn't sure what to do about it. She tried to recall what the officer had told her about the waitress and the sandwich shop, and did her best to stick to his advice.

"If you have a seat available, I'd like a small table in the back." The waitress smiled back at her and gently took her by the hand. Her expression seemed so much more genuine now than it had been before. Tucked away in the darkest corner of the dining room, across from one of the larger family-sized tables and tucked behind pots of strange looking plants, was a small circular table with two chairs. As the young woman slipped into her chair, she began to notice just how quiet the spot was compared to the hustle and bustle going down across the rest of the dining area. The waitress unspooled the plaid tablecloth and made sure her guest was tucked in nice and comfy before she lowered her voice and whispered something into her ear.

"Once I take care of the rest of our guests, I'd like to join you for lunch. I've got some break time stored up from a few months ago that I haven't used yet, and my boss is a pushover anyway." The young woman nodded and sent the blonde waitress on her way with a smile of her own. From her spot in the corner, she watched as the blonde waitress catered to the rest of the lunch rush. She handled the stress well, expertly conducting the flow of both people and food. No matter how specific or asinine a customer's request, the waitress made sure to keep track of everything and everyone. When she arrived late just a few minutes ago, Tabitha was expecting to see the blonde get chewed out by management, but after watching her work, she could understand why nobody complained. They needed a cute employee like her to bring customers in and keep them satisfied. The way she could balance four or five plates along her thin arms while simultaneously weaving in and out of hungry customers and rambunctious kids made her think the waitress had magnets stuffed inside of her billowy sleeves. The more time she spent watching her and listening to her talk and joke around with her customers, the harder it was for the young woman to shake the sinking suspicion that she knew that blonde waitress from somewhere. It was becoming all too easy to predict what she was going to say and where she was going to go.

About five minutes later, her meal arrived, much sooner than she expected. She worried the blonde waitress might deliver it to her once she was through tending to the other guests. Instead, it arrived in the arms of a handsome stranger. We all have our own priorities when we meet someone new. Sometimes we notice the sound of their footsteps first, and other times we pick up on their natural scent before noticing what color hair they have or how long it is. What we notice first depends on our own dispositions and expectations. The very first thing Tabitha noticed about the man delivering her food was his incredible height. 6" 7', easy. Maybe 6" 8', if he wore some thick soled shoes. The second thing about him that she picked up on was his hands. His nails and cuticles were clean-cut and well-manicured, but the man's leathery hands and cratered callouses betrayed his experience as a laborer. This man probably buttered his toast with good old fashioned elbow grease. His hair was a deep, contemplative blue hue, bound tightly in a ponytail. She didn't know many men who could rock facial hair quite like this guy. His beard wasn't especially thick, but it wrapped around his muscular jawline nicely and seemed to settle so comfortably between his ears and his chin. When she was caught staring, the waiter squeezed his eyes shut tightly and beamed at her.

"Hallo, miss. You like Nana's old fashioned sandwich recipe, yes?"

What an accent. It suited his feathered cap and green overalls perfectly. She hadn't heard anything like it before. This man was definitely from the "Old World". His voice was so much higher than she anticipated, but it wasn't unpleasant. It made him sound so cheerful. She smiled back at him and nodded.

"Yes, I've been looking forward to it all week." The waiter raised the glass bottle cola high and popped the cap open with one quick twist. As he did, his sleeves drooped a bit, exposing his chiseled forearm. Holding a frosty stein in one hand and the glass bottle cola in the other, he tipped the lip of the cola bottle against the stein and slowly poured.

"To keep the cola from spilling over, miss," he told her, stealthily puffing out his chest as he poured. He seemed pretty proud of himself for knowing something so simple. The young woman had seen something like this before. Her mother, who waitressed her fair share of tables in high school, learned from an early age this was the best way to pour a soda or a beer for a customer without drowning them in fizz.

He placed the stein at her table and her club sandwich beside it. The bread was piping hot and oozing that delicious "freshly baked" aroma Tabitha craved. The waiter tucked the metal tray underneath his arm and turned to leave.

"If you need anything at all, miss, just give Rolf a…how you say…holler, yes?" He turned to the young woman expectantly and began rolling his hands back and forth, like he was trying to filter out the wavering confidence in his voice. She smiled back at him and nodded.

"I'll do just that. Thank you, Rolf." Pleased with himself for picking the right word at the right time, the waiter gave himself a literal pat-on-the-back before slipping back into the kitchen.

"Don't let 'ol Rolf for you, kiddo. That guy might've been able to pull off whole immigrant kid routine when we were kids, but now that man's just as westernized as you or me." The blonde waitress had returned, carrying with her a small cup of coffee and what looked to be a particularly thick PB&amp;J sandwich. The bread was so dense it was hard to tell if the white brick weighing down her plate was a sandwich or a slice of cake. She made herself comfortable in the chair across from the young woman and took a quick bite out of her sandwich.

"If you came here with one of our limited edition coupons," she said between bites, "then someone down at Peach Creek PD must've sent you this way." Tabitha nodded and took a big bite out of her own sandwich, determined to prove to the blonde that she was the true sandwich connoisseur. The blonde put down her lunch and started to mold the air with her hands.

"Let me guess. You talked with a big, gingery, shovel-chin looking homeboy, right? Kinda angry looking? Orange peach fuzz…right around here?" She winked at her guest and made an exaggerated pouting expression, tracing the bottom of her chin with her burgundy nails. She had hit the nail on the head, mostly.

"That sounds about right," the young woman replied, taking a gentle sip of her cola and then hastily stifling an unexpected belch. "Though I don't know if I'd describe him as being 'angry looking'. Maybe stern." As much as she hated to admit it, the way the officer treated her had been nothing if not professional. The waitress laughed.

"That right? Shoot, honey, Kev's slippin' on us. That fool might just have a heart after all." The blonde's demeanor changed after that little jab. She closed her eyes and slowly lowered the crust of her own sandwich back onto her plate. After draining her cup of its caffeinated contents, she knit her hands together pensively and stared at her guest, cutting a hole through her sandwich and right into her heart. Tabitha started back at the blonde, chewing nervously. She loudly swallowed. How a woman could go from such a jovial state to one so somber without suffering crippling whiplash must've been something of a miracle.

"If he's sent you to us, then there must've been some kind of breakthrough, right?"

A few more nervous nibbles. Breakthrough?

"Kev wouldn't have asked you to come visit us unless he was positive you knew something about them. Did you meet them? Or did you just see one of them?"

Meet who? See what? Them? Tabitha forced her brain to go from zero to one hundred in a flash. She needed to start making sense of all of the puzzles pieces she had been assembling since she arrived in Peach Creek, starting with the identity of the blonde waitress. Deep into her memories of Saint she retreated, and slowly, surely, she started recovering the details she could recall about the childhood friends he had gushed so much about.

"She must be Nazz," the young woman thought to herself. "Blonde. Full figured. Kinda ditzy, but seems earnest and sweet. Fits Saint's description well enough." What other details she could remember about Nazz were limited to minor things about her physical appearance and the fact that when he was just a kid, Saint had harbored something of a crush for her. Next on the list was the police officer. She definitely remembered a Kevin from Saint's stories, so it stood to reason "Kev" and Kevin were the same man. She wanted to kick herself for not picking up on the subtle similarities between the police officer and the Kevin from Saint's memories. The man he had described to her was a brash, angry, juvenile kind of guy however, so she had just assumed the red hair and shovel-chin were a coincidence. She could only guess the circumstances of his work had weeded out his aggressive disposition and replaced it with a more disciplined one. Rolf was a no brainer; the man was a walking stereotype enough as it was, but his habit of referring to himself in the third-person betrayed any efforts he might have been making to conceal his identity. The Rolf he had told her about was utterly incapable of lying, anyway. He was much too kind. Stealthily, she scanned the room for anyone else who might fit one of the other descriptions he had given her. For all she knew, everyone from his old neighborhood might hang out here. Her search wasn't yielding any fruit though, so she quickly gave up.

If her assumption about the blonde's identity was spot on, then it stood to reason that Nazz would be just as invested in learning more about Saint's disappearance as she was. But how could she have known anything about that? Kevin didn't know anything about Saint's activities until she had arrived on his doorstep just a few hours ago. Could he have called her in the ten minutes it took her to go from the station to the restaurant? It was doubtful, but it might explain why Nazz was late. She'd have to do a little probing if she wanted any answers. And there was still the matter of the men that Nazz seemed to think that she, a total stranger, also happened to know about. Tabitha pinched her eyebrows together and started to raffle through the names of all the people Saint had told her about. Nazz, Kevin, and Rolf were already covered. That just left three people, and none of them seemed to be the Storm Rider sort.

Still, as she had just learned with Kevin, Saint's recollections were not peerless. His friend's had grown since he had last seen them, so she couldn't rule out the possibility that one or more of the three people she was thinking about were with him when the factory went up. As she pondered the possibilities more and more, she could feel a mental door slowly open up inside her brain. Just how long had it been since Saint had seen any of these people? Months? No, more like years, probably. His recollection about Kevin and his personality wasn't the least bit congruent with the man he was now, after all.

Tabitha followed Nazz's lead and quickly downed her own drink. What remained of her sandwich she left untouched, for now. For as delicious as it was, it would have to wait. She needed something to occupy her hands. Mindlessly, she started to play with her hair, though it was cut so short, she was having a difficult time getting her twist on. There would be no delicate way of broaching the subject. She'd just have to do what she did with Kevin, and spill her guts. She wasn't confident she had the patience to tell the same story twice, though, so before she got the ball rolling, she decided to test the waters.

"Pardon me if I'm mistaken, miss, but would your name happen to be Nazz?" The blonde waitress slowly nodded.

"You weren't looking me in the eye when you asked that, kiddo, so I'm gonna guess you aren't just looking at my tag out the corner of your eye and playing a prank on me?" tabitha nodded back politely.

"You seem to have a much better idea of what's going on than I do, Nazz, and since you're already so invested in eating lunch with me today, why don't we hang out for a bit and exchange some information?" Nazz scratched her head, confused by her guest's suddenly formal tone. Tabitha folded her hands and placed them in her lap. "If you don't mind, could you please go grab your friend with the ponytail? I feel like what I have to share with you is just as much Rolf's business as it is yours."


	8. Skylink

When Kevin became chief of Peach Creek's first, and only, Air Trek Criminal Control Unit just a few years ago, no one cared why. What people did care about was what he was going to do with all the tax-dollars his new department would inevitably be living off. At the forefront of his agenda were two things; training, and education. To control those who would abuse Air Trek technology and endanger the lives of law-abiding citizens, it is necessary to train officers in the art of apprehending those sorts of criminals. By educating those officers, as well as the civilians they protect, criminal use of Air Trek technology will be reduced. Because his initiative included these two things first, the initial apprehension his pet project was met with eventually dispersed. To this day, training and education remain extremely important to not just the ATCC, but to the entirety of the Peach Creek Police Department. And at the very back of Kevin's mind, usually found sloppily scrawled at the bottom of his budgeting reports, was one, simple request. A computer. Didn't have to be big. Didn't have to be too fancy. He wasn't in the money for the kind of machine NASA might use to guide an intergalactic probe through the deepest reaches of space. All he wanted for his department was the convenience of a state-of-the-art computer. A few months ago, after dutifully serving the Peach Creek community, his wish was granted, and the ATCC received a series of very nice, very new, very expensive computers. They were a lot more than he expected, and a lot better than he could have hoped for. And for these reasons, only he, and his handpicked crew of officers, was allowed regular access to the department's most powerful machine.

A less glamorous part of controlling criminal activity involves crunching a lot of numbers and doing a lot of boring research. You know these police reports you sometimes see officers begrudgingly filling in after every little public disturbance? They track that crap religiously for a reason. For as labor intensive as the analysis process is, if there is someone competent on the other side of things willing to comb through all that raw data, you can learn some very telling things about the people you protect and the criminals you seek to control. Kevin had experienced first-hand just how useful this technique could be, so when he was given autonomy over his own department, implementing it was top priority. Because of their large size and tendency to make a lot of noise, the ATCC's most powerful computers were stored in the Peach Creek PD's lowest basement, far enough underground to keep them from pestering those in the department who were busy fixing real problems. This suited Kevin and his crew just fine, because those computers were good for a lot more than just number crunching, but if the computers just so happened to be stored far away from the prying eyes of the other department heads, then they sure weren't going to complain.

A few hours had passed since Kevin had taken his guest's little brown package and holed himself up deep inside the bowels of the department's basement. And for as far as he could tell, he'd probably be there for the next several hours, which suited him just fine. Spread out in front of his monitor were three items; the little brown package, and two razor thin memory sticks, each sealed inside of a small plastic bag. The sticks themselves were preserved in a tiny, translucent sleeve, barely thicker than your fingernail. Bright orange box-cutter in hand, Kevin sliced the package open and began the slow, careful ritual of peeling away the seven or so inches of packing tape that held the little box together. Kevin's fingers moved swiftly and his cuts were precise. He didn't just have a vague idea of what was inside of the package. He knew exactly what was inside because this was the third little brown package his department had received in the last six months. The memory sticks always came in little brown packages, and they never had a return address. The previous two had just mysteriously spawned in Kevin's office without warning. Cameras went up shortly thereafter, but never managed to catch hide nor hair of the person, or persons, responsible for delivering them. This was the first package to earn the distinct honor of being ferried in by courier. And that didn't sit well with him. But no amount of worrying was going to get him any closer to the answers he was looking for, so he did his best to repress that part of his brain and just focus on cracking open what he expected to be the last little brown package he'd be getting for a while.

In the back corner of the basement lab, nestled comfortably in a big leather chair, sat a young man about Kevin's age, whittling away a thick piece of wood. Though his eyes were hidden behind a pair of tinted shades and the room was just barely aglow with the ambient light of a dozen or so computer monitors, his knife carved out chunks of wood effortlessly, confidently, its razor edge just barely grazing his cuticles as he whittled. He whistled a chipper tune to himself as he worked. Excluding the buzz of the overclocked computers, his whistling was the only sound Kevin had to look forward to whenever he holed himself down in the depths of the police department's basement.

"You're a real songbird, you know that, Jonny?" Kevin balanced the little brown package on its side and started to peel away what remained of the tape. One by one, red packing peanuts started to pour from the incision he had just carved into its side. From where Jonny was sitting, it looked as though Kevin's hands were covered in fat little blood cells. A box of latex gloves sailed across the lab and landed neatly in Kevin's lap.

"What can I say, Kev," Jonny replied mindlessly, "I try and do my part". He quickly returned his attention to his whittling, raising his knife close to his lips and softly blowing. A mound of sawdust and woodchips was starting to grow around the base of his chair.

"I like it. It's more upbeat than usual."

"Chopin'll do that to ya."

Jonny joined Kevin's department shortly following its inception. Peach Creek's Air Trek Criminal Control Unit came about during a time in both of their lives when they sorely needed some direction, and their childhood friendship helped cement a partnership that was now going on two years. They worked well together. Kevin was a lot more adept at handling the more social dimensions of the department's work while Jonny excelled at conducting the aforementioned research. He'd always been a bit of a loner, but that didn't mean he didn't like the company of others. Jonny was just the kind of person who could find ways to entertain himself far too easily. If there ever was a period in his life he had been genuinely lonely, Jonny probably never noticed. He liked working with his hands, and his creative disposition had helped create opportunities for the department Kevin never could have engineered on his own. He was definitely an eccentric, but some of the world's most spectacular, dangerous innovations came about because of the incessant tinkering of eccentrics. In another time, and another place, Jonny might have had a hard time finding his place in the world. He and Kevin had helped build something special in the ATCC, however, and being able to wake up every morning with the knowledge his talents made a difference to someone made him happy. Growing up, he had always had a strange fascination with all things wood, and his penchant for whittling proved he was still drawn to the stuff. Many of his earliest friends were puppets and figures carved out of the wooden planks and wood chips he found lying around the neighborhood. While he might have outgrown these "friends" a long time ago, he never allowed himself to forget about them.

"I know we each have our own working theories about what these packages are and what they all mean, but I'm pretty confident I know what's inside this one. Bearing that thought in mind, I took the liberty of updating our software to the most recent version of _Skylink_." Jonny wiped his knife on his jeans, pried himself out of his chair, and began to make his way towards what remained of the little brown package. "Once I heard we got another one, I figured you might be interested in trying to engineer a proper dive." He watched as Kevin drove a gloved hand inside and carefully exhumed its contents.

"There's no guarantee this is gonna be what you think it's gonna be, Jonny," Kevin replied. Jonny could tell by the way his partner was talking that he was trying his best to remain cautiously optimistic. But the way his fingers shook betrayed his excitement. "And even if it is, we don't know if the password is even loaded onto it. Remember who we think we're dealing with here. If these things are coming from who we think they are, then whatever's inside this thing might just leave us asking more questions." The package's contents emerged from its cardboard prison with a barely audible 'pop'. Kevin held his hand against the closest computer monitor, bathing it in a fuzzy green glow. Pinched between Kevin's thumb and forefinger was a memory stick, immaculately clean and razor thin. After gently lowering the stick into a sterile clamshell storage unit, Kevin retrieved the remaining memory sticks from a locked drawer underneath his desk. One by one, he placed the sticks beside one another in the order the department had received them. Jonny watched from behind his partner's shoulders.

The significance of the memory sticks was something that had baffled both Kevin and Jonny from day one. It wasn't until Jonny did some sniffing around online that they were able to deduce what they were expected to do with them. Air Treks are unique for a lot of reasons. Most obviously, they are high-performance roller skates that enable users to run faster and jump higher than they could naturally. Used correctly, they can even, to certain degree, emulate the sensation of sustained flight. But Kevin and Jonny knew all of this before signing on with the ATCC. What they didn't realize, however, is that the memory sticks stored in the heel of every manufactured Air Trek has the potential to record nigh infinite amounts of data. As soon as a consumer straps on his first pair of Air Treks and clumsily wobbles out his front door, that memory stick starts recording all kinds of things. How fast do you go? How far do you ride? Do you jump a lot? Do you jump high? What kinds of tricks can you perform?

Originally, this functionality was designed to give new users the ability to track their progress and render their riding habits in a format that they could upload to a computer and then study. However, as Air Treks started to become more popular with gangsters and criminals, more and more people started modifying the Air Treks software to suit their needs. In time, Storm Riders developed ways to "jailbreak" their ATs and enable to their memory sticks to keep track of stuff more relevant to their own…specific interests. Mainly, information about the Parts War and one's stake in it. Soon after this "jailbroken" software went live, Storm Riders started using it as a tool to raise awareness for their teams, their goals, and their ill-gotten resources. Having a digital record of all your battles, parts, tricks, and experiences helped make Air Treks more accessible, for better or worse.

These 'enhanced' memory sticks, with their bootleg software and jailbroken functionality, went from a back-alley parlor trick to a global innovation a few months later when a certain proprietary software, normally only available to the richest of the rich, was pirated and promptly released online for free.

The name of this software application was _Skylink._

But it didn't make waves in the Storm Rider community because it had previously been an unknown. Everyone knew about _Skylink_. If you spend an afternoon watching television, you'll probably see at least half a dozen commercials advertising it. What made the leak so special was that _Skylink_ was out, and it was out for free. Tentatively speaking, at least, it was out for free. You still needed a cutting-edge machine in order to operate the software properly and fully benefit from it, but if you had the means to buy the computer, you didn't have to worry about splitting your fortune between one or the other. Before being pirated and promptly bastardized by the Storm Rider community, _Skylink_ had been the world's first attempt at creating a piece of software fully capable of immersing a user in a virtual environment. Prior to the leak, the only organizations with the capital to buy both the software and the hardware were professional sports leagues or the fabulously wealthy. Hardware wise, you needed not only a supercomputer, but also a state-of-the-art head tracking device capable of properly digitizing your consciousness, uploading it to the web, and then bringing you back in one piece. Not the kind of thing you wanna go cheap on.

Sports leagues used the software primarily for training their athletes during the off-season. Using _Skylink_ as a medium, the software could be configured to recreate any virtual environment the user was capable of programming. Though the experiences within Skynet were utterly virtual, they were realistic enough to hone reflexes and when properly supplemented with physical exercise, a fine way to keep your top players in top shape. There are multiple ways to render environments in Skynet. You use some generic default environments that come packaged with the software, and if you are creative enough and have the patience, you can craft your own. Or you can insert a regular old memory stick and simulate whatever environments, or personalities, that inhabit the stick. It was this functionality, its ability to produce virtual environments out of a device so universally understood by the competitive community that made the _Skylink_ leak such a tremendous break for Storm Riders.

In the hours following the leak, millions are estimated to have downloaded the software. Of those millions, a few hundred thousand are estimated to have been Storm Riders. As for how many of those individuals actually possess the equipment required to utilize _Skylink_, no one really knows. Even top ranking Storm Riders, the ones with the most fiendish underworld connections, would have to sell an arm and a leg and maybe even a kidney or two in order to put together a rig capable of running _Skylink_. But those who do possess the means now have access to an ever-expanding virtual environment where they can ride and fight and fly to their hearts' content without ever having to surrender their bodies to the physical consequences of typical Storm Rider behavior. This new opportunity caused the competitive environment to change in unexpected ways. Determined to get a piece of the virtual pie, smaller teams merged together to form larger teams. In favor of securing resources, riders sacrificed autonomy and individuality. Not everyone hopped on board the hype train, and those that did manage to land the green necessary to make _Skylink_ dives a regular thing limited its usage to their teams more inexperienced members. Dominating a virtual environment is fine, but if you spend too much time messing around in cyberspace, you're real-world abilities will inevitably start to slip. Nothing spoils an athlete's career faster than muscle atrophy.

But for those who would learn to use _Skylink_ responsibly, new, unexpected opportunities emerged. Storm Riders living hundreds of miles apart could now compete for territory and parts online. This allowed people to form bonds with teammates and competitors they might otherwise have never met. Because data stored in a ATs memory stick could now be rendered virtually, new channels of communication opened up. With the right tools and expertise, you could easily send more than just meaningless computer code. You could transmit messages, or even entire experiences, through _Skylink's_ constantly expanding virtual environments. And it was this functionality that Peach Creek's Air Trek Criminal Control Unit was most invested in.

Since its inception, the department had spear-headed numerous projects. Some of them had been laughably simple, public-relation type stuff, like the time Kevin and Jonny and the rest of the department spent a few weekends passing outAir Treck "Safety Awareness" fliers. When they tried distributing them in uniform throughout town, the people who weren't laughing at them were busy scrapping as much of the literature as they could get their hands on. The local Storm Riders didn't like having the department around to keep tabs on them. Only the biggest cities could usually afford to have a special anti-storm rider police force, and since Peach Creek wasn't all that large, many Storm Riders flocked to it because they believed they'd be flying under the fuzz's radar. But in time, they learned the consequences of interfering with the departments initiatives.

Kevin and Jonny were easily the youngest officers in the entire Peach Creek PD, and the way they seemed to focus so exclusively on their own departments unique needs didn't always sit well with the rest of the police force. At the time, Air Trecks were still a very young technology. In the eyes of some of their older associates, dedicating an entire department to regulating their usage was on the same level as setting aside an entire department to eradicating the misuse of skateboards or scooters. To these men and women, Kevin, Jonny, and the rest of the department's motley crew of officers were little more than paranoid green-horned mall cops. Air Trecks weren't dangerous and they weren't complex.

If roller blades were cigarettes, Air Trecks were just e-cigarettes; new aged, expensive, and a poor substitute for the stuff they'd grown up playing with.

In return, many of the officers working within the Peach Creek's Air Treck Criminal Control Unit resented their more outspoken opponents. Interestingly, either because they were more mature or just lacked the patience to deal with their naysaying, Kevin and Jonny didn't resent these people. Their concerns were easy enough to understand. It takes an unnatural kind of foresight to see the next big technological breakthrough and jump on it. It takes an ungodly kind of foresight to see the next big technological breakthrough and peer beyond the flashy marketing and recognize the potential dangers.

And despite all the protests and the infighting and the regular mockery, the department was successful. Frighteningly successful. In a period of just two years, Kevin and Jonny had turned a dumb idea into a meteoric enterprise. It hadn't come cheap, and it hadn't come easy, but after six long years of planning, a couple degrees, and some soul searching, the Peach Creek PD's Air Treck Criminal Control Unit had reduced Air Treck related crimes by over fifty percent. The nature of the department's work was complicated, but its criminal philosophy was simple.

Weed out the weak, and the strong'll learn to cope.

"Stamping out Air Treck related crimes completely is impossible," Kevin confessed once in an interview. "In the same way that human trafficking will always exist in some capacity, and in the same way that drug smuggling will always exist in some capacity, for as long as Air Trecks continue to be manufactured, there will be Air Treck related crimes. If you need another example, look to our cars. The drive-by shooting didn't exist until the car came along. Our department seeks to reduce criminal activity by pressuring those among us who would abuse Air Treck technology. The Peach Creek PD's Firearm Control Unit operates on a similar principle."

By rounding up and either rehabilitating or imprisoning those who would abuse Air Trecks and get caught, the department ushered the remaining Storm Riders into ranks. A society already stratified and competitive became even more stratified and even more competitive. Smugglers could no longer afford to be violent. Violence makes noise, and noise attracts attention. Because the department existed, and more importantly because the department knew what the hell it was doing, it made sure that if a Storm Rider managed to start a criminal career, it was because he was a cool, rationale, and well-adjusted criminal who was smarter than the average bear. The kinds of criminals the department produced were not so much criminals as they were opportunists; sneak around, toil quietly, and whatever you do, don't you dare get caught.

It took a while for the Storm Rider community to adjust to this change, as the department's presence in the inner and outer rings of the city ensured that if they were spotted, they'd likely be profiled on the spot. But as Kevin often liked to tell people, not all Storm Riders were criminals. The vast majority of upper-level riders just wanted to be left the hell alone to do what they do best. Compete. In time, the Storm Riders developed a weird, almost symbiotic relationship with Kevin's department.

You keep the criminal scum out of our competitions, and we'll do what we can to clean up after ourselves.

After two years of networking and handshaking, Kevin and Jonny could both say with assurance that what they had done had made a difference in their city's history. They were pleased with the department's progress and glad to know they had earned the respect of some of their fair city's residents, Storm Riders included. But even in the face of all their success, there was still an important goal that Kevin and Jonny and company had yet to settle. Before the department was even a blip of their collective radars, Kevin and Jonny had been busy toiling away, desperate to resolve a certain unsolved mystery that had been picking at their brains, and their hearts, day and night, for the last six years of their lives. No matter what kind of danger faced while working for the department, no matter how demeaning or how deadly, they endured for the sake of seeing this one mystery solved. And after patiently gathering clues, securing funds, and conducting research, what they believed to be the final piece to their mystery puzzle had arrived on their doorstep at last.

Two pairs of eyes glared at the three tiny memory sticks. Kevin and Jonny sat beside one another, unblinking, brains storming and hearts racing. A sweaty palm brushed against Kevin's shoulder and smacked him heartedly across the noggin.

"Let's figure this mess out, Kevin. You and me."

_Let's figure it out. Let's brainstorm. Let's solve the mystery._ These had become Jonny's favorite phrases, since becoming one of Kevin's closest partners. It might have been because Jonny had been born with a big head, or it might have been because he spent so much time alone with his thoughts, but if the solution to a problem was close to being solved, Jonny couldn't relax until he felt like he had taken more steps towards solving it. Kevin was thankful his friend was so stubborn. It was thanks in part to Jonny's clingy disposition that the department had been able to make sense out of the memory sticks in the first place. He two of them had been wrestling with this mystery for so long, he wasn't even sure they were on the same page anymore. But that was okay. Having different perspective was invaluable. Even if they couldn't agree on everything, as long as they kept waxing ideas off one another, they could keep moving forward.

"Are we both in agreement about the identity of the man in that girl's testimony?"

Kevin nodded. "There's no doubt about it. The man she described was Edd. If she's telling us the truth, then it's gotta be him." Jonny smiled and lowered his head a little, scratching it against the back of his chair. His hair had grown out quite a bit since he was a kid. His mother's home-made buzz cuts were nothing more than an embarrassing childhood memory now. When most kids get their first job and start making their own money, most of them buy new clothes, or new shoes, or a new phone. The first thing Jonny ever bought with his own money was a decent haircut. His family hadn't been poor growing up, but he had been born into a family of flower children. His mother didn't take to being a bored old housewife too well, and as Jonny was growing up, she liked to keep herself entertained by taking up all kinds of weird little hobbies on the side.

Most of these hobbies were fleeting; she'd pour way too much money into buying up all the equipment needed to excel at whatever had caught her eye, and then she'd tire herself out planning her new career. The next morning, she'd wake up burnt out and bored out of her mind. The only hobby that she actually managed to stick with after all these years was cosmetics and hair care. She had now matured into a talented beautician, but she cut her teeth chopping off whatever hair little Jonny could manage to grow almost as soon as she could see it. It saved the family money and gave her captive hair-model, and there was little that Jonny could do to protect his hair from her ambitions, apart from going out of his way to pay for his own haircuts.

Nowadays, he was known around the department for his luscious locks. He had experimented with all kinds of hairdos since high school, and after lots of careful meditation and personal introspection, Jonny had come to realize that he could rock the afro rather effortlessly. Peach Creek PD's protocol prevented him from keeping it as long as he liked, but he found work arounds. Between his long, curly brown hair, laid-back personality and tinted shades, Jonny was a pretty cool customer. Articulate, aloof, professional, while at the same time remaining a warm and dedicated worker. Out of all his friends, it was perhaps Jonny who had matured the most since childhood.

"Well, I guess we can write off our worst-case-scenario now," he said, glancing over at the dry-erase board that was currently blocking the basement's one and only fire-exit. "We know at least one of them was still alive." He then raised his hand and started to scratch his chin. He was self-conscious about the long-term effects of playing with his hair. "But the way she describes the factory makes it tough for me to sleep at night." He turned nervously to Kevin. "You think whatever hit up the factory took him with them on their way out?"

"Tough to say," he replied, trying his best to remain professional and cautiously optimistic. "She said the van was nowhere to be found, which makes me think he might've known they were coming and gotten outta dodge before they showed up. That would've explained why they trashed the place. They might've been looking for him."

"Or maybe they clashed and he made a beeline for the van once he realized the factory was a goner," Jonny conceded sadly. "But we can go back and forth all night on that front. I'm bettin' that because we got the package in one piece and it didn't explode as soon as it got here, whoever sent it isn't out to kill us."

"But why wait three months before sending it out?"

Jonny shrugged. "All the usual reasons, I'd imagine. Maybe he wanted to put some distance between himself and that girl before shipping the package off anywhere. It'd make sense if he thought he was being tailed."

In the end, they decided there was no harm in assuming Edd had managed to send the package. If they were mistaken, they'd get over it. Next issue on the agenda; was he alone?

"Taking the girl's testimony into consideration, we know Edd was living in this general area for a while." Kevin placed a large map on the table and started to scribble notes in the margins. The spots where Peach Creek and Lemon Brook intersected were circled in red. The stink of permanent marker weighed heavy in the air. "I guess we technically only have hard proof he was poking around between the spring and the tail end of the summer, but the way she describes her relationship with him makes it sound like he had been hanging around Lemon Brook for a long time."

"Long enough to earn the respect of the resident Storm Riders, at least."

Where he might've been holed up during that time was another angle to consider. The man had to eat and he had to sleep. The factory probably took care of the latter and the copious amounts of fridges and coolers scattered around the factory implied he was eating and drinking well enough, but that didn't explain where all the food was coming from. The most logical assumption was that Edd was either paying for everything or stealing it. And given Edd's status as something of a moral paragon, there was no way in hell so much as a bite of those supplies had been burgled. Just to be sure, Jonny ran a quick search through their department's database for recent food and water thefts. A few hits, but all of those incidents had been long since resolved.

"How's he paying for it all? Where's the money coming from?"

"It's been six years since the three of them skipped town, Kevin. Even if you're just hopping around, doing odd jobs, you can make a lot of money in six years. And Edd's smart. I bet he could've turned all those quarters into a small fortune if Eddy hadn't always been around to muck up his plans." Kevin put down his marker and pinched his eyebrows together. He looked a little stressed, but he was actually just jittery with excitement. He capped his marker and slipped deeper into the gut of his chair. The three memory sticks lay off to the side, untouched, starting back at him. Kevin stared back. From his own chair, Jonny watched his friend with amusement in his eyes. The purpose to all this questioning and postulating was to test their mettle against whatever secrets lay tucked away inside of the memory sticks. They would probably figure everything out after just plugging those inside their computers and taking a peek inside, but if they did that right away, they'd lose the chance to test themselves. Jonny and Kevin wanted to compare answers. How did their own theories stack up to the potential truths?

"Every time we've tried to render those memory sticks in _Skylink_, we hit a firewall," Jonny explained aloud, refreshing Kevin's memory. "The first time we tried, with just the one stick, we got just enough of a reaction to tell us something important was stored inside of its memory banks. Nothing we could hope to render, but we definitely got something. And when we tried it again when the second one showed up, we actually managed to dig up some code, as I'm sure you recall. Nothing solid, nothing we could render or analyze, but we got a whole lot deeper into the program when we used two sticks instead of just the one." Kevin sat in his chair, elbows on the table, fingers knit together tightly. He stared unwaveringly at the three memory sticks, as though he were conducting an interrogation. Jonny sat down in the chair beside him, carefully slipping the three sticks between his fingers

"But we've never tried diving into _Skylink_ with all three together. Anything could happen! This is an exciting time for us, Kevin."

Kevin said nothing, at least not at first. Instead, he slipped his fingers underneath his desk and felt around for the handle of one of his bottom cabinets. He kicked against the side of his desk until it finally came loose.

"After I go under, I want you make preparations to call a few of these numbers. If these sticks end with us neck deep in _Skylink_, I want us to be prepared."


	9. Reunion

Shortly after calling Rolf over to their table, the decision was made to move to the very back of the restaurant. He had led them to a tiny room in the back, just large enough for three people to comfortably squeeze inside. There was a table, a small refrigerator, and one window. The room was well-lit, and felt perfectly cozy. Rolf insisted that the space was always unoccupied, and that a short time ago it had been used as an extra break room.

It had taken a little over an hour for Tabitha to explain everything. She was as detailed with Nazz and Rolf as she had been with Kevin. Tabitha spared nothing, and was sure to emphasize all the things she believed brought the most comfort to her audience. Through it all, Kevin and Nazz listened with rapt attention, scarcely taking their eyes off her thin lips. Now that her story was through, the three of them sat in silence. Tabitha waited patiently in her seat for a response of some kind. Nazz played with the mascara pooling in the corner of her eyes. Rolf puffed away on a corncob pipe, filling the small room with a sweet smelling smoke every time he exhaled. Time, it seemed, had temporarily come to a stop for these two. Kevin had absorbed her testimony and then immediately assaulted her with a barrage of questions, but it was a long time before either Nazz or Rolf spoke up. Every few minutes or so, one of their faces would light up, and for a heartbeat, go from static stillness to incredible expressiveness. This expressiveness usually faded quickly, but for the short time that it was there, they looked happy.

"And shortly after I finished up with Kevin, he sent me over here." Tabitha then raised her head and stared out the window at the birds pecking at its tiny glass panes. "I suppose he trusted what I had told him to be the truth, so he wanted me to share that truth with the two of you." Nazz smiled and nodded. Rolf bit deeply into his pipe and inhaled, burning what was left of his fuel. He exhaled one last time before tucking the pipe inside of the pockets of his overalls. He slowly removed his feathered cap and placed it on the table, allowing his blue ponytail to drape over his broad shoulders. His eyes were moist, and when he smiled, his dimples broke through the smoke, scattering it.

"Head-In-Sock Ed-Boy has come home to us at last, hasn't he, Nazz-Girl?"

Tabitha wasn't used to seeing people cry. She had been to her fair share of funerals growing up, but you expect to see waterworks in a morgue. Watching a grown man cry his eyes out in the back of a restaurant was different. But it wasn't awkward. She felt moved. And also a little curious. Clearly, this man - this big, strong, burly lumberjack looking guy - had been waiting a very long time to hear a testimony like hers. Nazz's reaction was just the same. What remained of that morning's make-up extravaganza was now pooling in the lap of her apron. Together, in that little room, the two friends privately wept. They weren't loud, and their bodies didn't move too much, apart from the moments when they'd raise their heads occasionally to wipe their faces clean. The two friends simply sat there, their bodies paralyzed with happiness. After five more minutes of this, Tabitha tried to quietly to excuse herself. Before she could make it out the door, however, she felt someone tug gently and her sleeve.

"Please don't go yet, kiddo. Rolf and I wanna thank you properly. Won't you stay? Just a bit longer?" Tabitha turned her head and spent a few moments sizing up both Nazz and Rolf. Their cheeks were still red and their eyes were still wet and puffy, but there was a certain determination behind their gaze that made her want to stick around for a little longer. As far as Tabitha was concerned, this was probably their roundabout way of telling her they had answers to some of her own questions. She did as Nazz asked and slipped back into her seat, but not before making a request of her own.

"Let me buy you a cold drink. You both look drained." They both smiled back at Tabitha gratefully, but Rolf insisted payment wasn't necessary.

"You've shared with this son-of-a-shepherd the good news he's been waiting far too long to hear, trendy wheels-on-feet go-go-girl. Please, let Rolf pick up the tab this time." Rolf excused himself from the table and returned a short time later with three glass-bottle colas, ice cold. Tabitha accepted the token graciously, cracking the cap open with her teeth and pressing the frosty bottle against her neck. She pursed her tired lips together and sighed.

"I thought my sandwich tasted familiar." Rolf nodded at her shyly. His cheeks flushed red. He knew where Tabitha was going with this.

"Yes, well, what can Rolf say? Rolf only works here once every harvest or so, and Nazz-girl usually covers only the afternoon shifts, when Nana's bunions start to flare." Both Nazz and Tabitha did their best to stifle an involuntary spit take. "So, if Head-In-Sock-Edd-Boy did really come here during the summer time, like you suggested, it is likely neither Rolf nor Nazz-girl would have seen him." Nazz nodded quickly, sucking down the last of her cola.

"Rolf's right. And I spend so much time locked up in the basement of the police department, so if he really did blow through Peach Creek back then, it's no wonder we missed him." Tabitha smiled. She was just happy to finally know where she could get more delicious club sandwiches. Rolf then bowed his head low. Nazz followed his lead.

"But really, thank you, Tabitha-girl. Thank you for coming to see Rolf today."

"Yes, totally! You have no idea how long we've all been waiting to hear that Double D's okay."

Tabitha scratched her chin and gave Nazz a friendly but confused look. "Double D? Is that a nickname or something?" Nazz and Rolf exchanged confused looks of their own.

"Well, I guess it _is_ a nickname, but it's really more of a necessity than anything else, if you ask me. I don't know how else we'd keep those three apart without it." Tabitha cocked her head to the side, the same way that cats do when they are faced with a particularly difficult obstacle. She went back to dumbly suckling on her bottle of cola, waiting patiently for either Nazz or Rolf to fill her in on the joke she was obviously missing.

"What are you talking about?"

"Surely you jest Rolf, trendy wheels-on-feet go-go-girl? Certainly Double D Edd-Boy talked to you a great length about all of his friends, including Long-In-The-Neck Ed-Boy and the incorrigible Better-Check-Your-Wallet Ed-Boy?" This explanation made even less sense. Nazz abruptly butt-in, determined to salvage whatever sense was left in the conversation.

"You told us he talked at length about all his friends from his childhood, right?" Tabitha nodded in agreement. Nazz rolled her hands back and forth, as if to coax out the missing information from Tabitha's brain. "Then you can't tell me he didn't tell you anything about Ed and Eddy?"

Tabitha thought long and hard, but she couldn't recall anything about either of the two boys Nazz and Rolf were describing. One by one, Tabitha started to count off all the kids from Saint's childhood. She was positive she wasn't forgetting anymore because she didn't need to use all ten of her fingers to keep track.

"He told me all about Kevin, and Rolf, and Nazz, and then he started talking about this one really weird loner kid. Bald head? Carried around a plank of wood everywhere he went?" Rolf and Nazz answered simultaneously.

"You mean Jonny?"

"Must have been Jonny the Wood-Boy."

Tabitha nodded. "And after I had learned more than I ever needed to know about that kid and his hippy dippy parents, he told me about Jimmy, a real sweet pasty-looking kid and Sarah, his guard-dog of a best friend." She placed her now emptied bottle of cola on the counter and placed her hands in her lap. She looked so content to have drained not just one, but two bottles of cola that day. "But I'm afraid those're the only people he told me about. Not a word about either an Ed, or an Eddy." She cocked her head to the side once again. "But judging by your reactions, they must've been especially close."

"More like inseparable," Nazz insisted. "Those three were easily the modern day equivalent of the three musketeers." From where Tabitha was sitting, it sounded like at that moment, Rolf coughed "three stooges" underneath his breath, but she wasn't certain. When Tabitha asked just how close the three boys really were, Nazz said that it would be hard to explain to someone who didn't grow up with them.

"When we were all just kids, there was a reason we knew the three of them not just by their names, but by the sounds of their voices. It was such a rare sight, to see just one of them without hearing or seeing the other two closing in from behind. They never got along in the same way the rest of us did, and that just made their weird little friendship all the more amazing. On paper, those three couldn't have been more different. But somehow, when the three of them got together, they made it all work out." Nazz crossed her arms and lowered her head, to collect her thoughts. "Let me try explaining it like this. Y'know how if people think hard enough about it, they can cook up all kinds of excuses not to hang out with you?" Tabitha nodded. "They might say things like, 'Well, he and I, we just don't get along. We got different ways of doing things. He's an extrovert. I'm an introvert. He likes Pepsi, I like Coke, we could never make it work.' People can make up all kinds of reasons to avoid placing themselves outside of their comfort zones. But those three just…didn't seem to care about any of that stuff."

"Where they that different?" Nazz and Rolf nodded.

"When Rolf was just a wee boy, Rolf could hardly put up with just one Ed-boy. How the three of them could stand each other all summer long mystifies him. But Rolf always respected their friendship." As if by instinct, Nazz rose to her feet and started to collect their empty plates and discarded cola bottles. As she worked, she talked. Her usual valley girl tone was gone, and her eyes had a soft, dreamy glow to them. The waitress spoke softly, eloquently, and demonstrated an intelligence that Tabitha honestly didn't expect she was capable of.

"Those three are the reason why we were all able to smile, even when we only got to see our own families for a few hours every night after dinner. They gave us lots of good memories. In a way, they made our childhoods…so much more interesting." Tabitha paused to collect her thoughts and absorb all this new information she was being fed. There was no doubt what Rolf and Nazz had shared with her was true. These two men, Ed and Eddy, had been Saint's closest, most beloved friends. They might have even been the friends who asked Saint to investigate Air Trecks, all those years ago. And if he hadn't mentioned them to her before, the most likely reason why he was doing that was because he believed that by keeping their existence a closely-guarded secret, he was protecting them from something. Her imagination now running wild, Tabitha decided to politely interrupt Nazz to ask a question of her own. In time, Tabitha was sure she would come to learn who these two men were and what made their relationship with Saint so special. What most interested her now was why Rolf and Nazz fell to tears when they heard one of their close friends was still out and about somewhere and not rotting at the bottom of a lake or under a pile of dirt.

She broached the subject delicately, but without wasting time. She trusted her intuitions to be true and used her words to cut straight through to the heart of the matter.

"How long has it been since you two last heard from him?"

Nazz folded her hands into her lap and sighed. "Too long."

* * *

_A special thanks to everyone who has read, reviewed, and favorite my works! More content to come. As always, reviews, criticism, and shares are welcomed and greatly appreciated. Questions, too._

_Thanks for reading this far. I hope you'll continue to enjoy The Quarter Dollar Kings._


End file.
